An independent school's most cherished word is also its most easily misunderstood. Independence is written into mission statements, invoked at board retreats, and offered as an explanation for nearly everything a school chooses to do or declines to do. It is often treated as a synonym for autonomy in the fullest sense: freedom from oversight, freedom from external comparison, and freedom to define quality entirely on one's own terms.
In his reliably provocative manner, Yong Zhao suggests that a far better question is whether the work we’ve been assigning in schools was/is worth protecting in the first place. Consider the weight of such a question in leadership team meetings, faculty meetings, admission offices, or boardrooms.
Accreditation, properly understood, is not simply a benefit conferred upon a school following a private process conducted behind closed doors. It is a consequential form of public assurance.
How do we help schools remain clear about mission while adapting to changing conditions? How do we support leaders who are being asked to hold complexity with wisdom, courage, and steadiness? How do we build professional learning that is not merely a calendar of events, but an architecture for growth, connection, and shared problem-solving? How do we strengthen governance so that boards are not only fiduciary stewards, but thoughtful partners in sustaining institutional possibility?
For too long, education has often behaved as though excellence were singular and standardized—as though every student, educator, and institution ought to aspire toward the same profile of success. Yet the world we are preparing young people to inhabit increasingly rewards complementarity rather than uniformity. Complex societies depend not on sameness, but on ecosystems of differentiated contribution. The scientist requires the communicator. The strategist needs the empath.
In the wake of a gathering, there is often a quiet but consequential question: What now? The conversations have been rich, the ideas generative, the collegial energy unmistakable. And yet, as leaders return to their schools—calendars full, inboxes replenished—the work shifts from reflection to design. If April invited us to reconsider disruption as an opportunity for re-orientation, May asks something more exacting: How, precisely, do we build schools that embody that re-orientation in practice? Put differently, how do we design not only for performance, but for purpose?
