Comparative Education

Fernando Reimers is a scholar of international and comparative education whose work examines how societies define educational purposes, design policies, and transform education systems in response to changing social conditions. Comparative inquiry is central to his scholarship and teaching because it expands the range of possibilities available to educators and policymakers while revealing how history, culture, politics, institutional capacity, and professional practice shape what can be achieved in different settings.

Through the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard, Reimers has led numerous comparative studies involving researchers and practitioners from education systems around the world. This work has examined how countries reform curriculum to respond to new societal demands, prepare teachers to educate the whole student, implement deeper learning, and align education with global citizenship and the Sustainable Development Goals. More recent studies have compared how education systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how they are addressing the development of artificial intelligence and the growing effects of climate change.

A recurring question in this research is how education systems can learn from one another without simply copying policies or programs. Reimers has written influential work on adapting educational innovations across national borders to advance equity. This scholarship emphasizes that successful transfer requires understanding both the essential principles of an innovation and the cultural, political, institutional, and professional conditions of the setting in which it will be introduced. Comparative learning is therefore a process of interpretation, adaptation, and collaborative design rather than mechanical replication.

Reimers has also conducted comparative analyses of the relationship between research and education policy. His work examines how evidence is produced, interpreted, communicated, and used in policy decisions, and how researchers and decision-makers can engage in informed dialogue. This perspective recognizes that evidence alone does not determine policy: its influence is mediated by values, institutional interests, political conditions, professional knowledge, and the practical realities of implementation.

Comparative education also informs Reimers’s teaching. At Harvard, he teaches education policy analysis and educational innovation in comparative perspective and co-chairs the Global, Comparative and International Education concentration. His current research examines the educational value of internationally diverse courses, including how sustained engagement with classmates whose experiences and assumptions differ can help students develop a comparative mindset, greater intellectual flexibility, and the capacity to think more deeply about complex problems.

Reimers is currently leading a collaborative study of the history of the International Academy of Education. The study examines the Academy’s development as an international scholarly organization, its efforts to synthesize educational research, and its contributions to connecting evidence with policy and practice around the world. Reimers is a Fellow and elected president of the Academy.

Across this body of work, comparative education serves both an intellectual and a practical purpose. It helps explain why education systems develop as they do, challenges assumptions that any one system provides a universal model, and enables educators and policymakers to learn more thoughtfully from the experiences of others. For Reimers, comparison is ultimately a means of expanding educational imagination and strengthening the capacity to design policies and institutions responsive to the needs of particular societies and to the challenges they share.