Comparative Education

Learning across societies to expand educational possibility

Fernando Reimers is a scholar of international and comparative education whose work examines how societies define the purposes of education, distribute educational opportunity, 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 showing how history, culture, politics, institutional capacity, and professional practice shape what can be achieved in different settings.

Reimers approaches comparison not as a search for a single best system to be copied, but as a disciplined way to develop better questions, identify alternative approaches, and understand the conditions under which policies and innovations succeed or fail. His research combines cross-national studies with close analysis of policy implementation, institutional change, and the experiences of educators and students.

Comparative Research through the Global Education Innovation Initiative

Through the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard, Reimers has led comparative studies involving researchers, policymakers, 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 sustainable development. More recent studies have compared how education systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how they are addressing the transformations associated with artificial intelligence and climate change.

Educational Equity and the Politics of Reform

A central strand of this work concerns the relationship between public policy, implementation, and educational equity. In The Quest for Educational Equity in Mexico, Reimers examines the dynamics of implementing reforms at scale to expand meaningful educational opportunity for disadvantaged students. The study argues that reducing inequality requires both system-wide and targeted policies, implemented broadly and sustained long enough to become institutionalized. It also shows why system-wide reforms are often politically difficult to sustain: they challenge entrenched interests, while more limited interventions may be easier to implement but can leave unequal structures intact.

This recent analysis extends questions developed in Reformar la escuela pública para el siglo XXI: Los desafíos de México, which examined the purposes, politics, and institutional requirements of public-school reform in Mexico. Taken together, these studies use the experience of one education system to illuminate broader comparative questions: how reforms acquire legitimacy, how they survive changes in political leadership, how institutional capacity shapes implementation, and how policy can expand both access and the quality and relevance of learning.

His edited book Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances, advances a framework to conceptualize educational opportunity as a series of transitions in the educational trajectories of students, which is then adopted to examine the role of education policy in transforming opportunity across the Americas. Another edited book, Aprender Mas y Mejor, analyzes the impact of four flagship education initiatives to advance educational equity in Mexico.

He directed a landmark study of the determinants of grade retention in rural schools in Honduras. Drawing on evidence from students, teachers, parents, and school records, it linked repetition to low achievement and unequal opportunities to learn. The study showed that repetition rarely addressed learning difficulties and often became a pathway to school dropout. It recommended stronger teaching, differentiated support, better materials, and reduced reliance on grade retention.

His edited book La Educacion en El Salvador de cara al Siglo XXI resulted from the uniquely participatory sector assessment he directed in the wake of the signing of the Peace Accords, creating the foundation of a sustained education reform. His edited book Analisis del Sistema Educativo en el Paraguay, resulting from another education sector assessment he directed during the early years of that country’s transition to democracy, created the intellectual underpinnings of a national education reform which Reimers was subsequently invited to advise for several years.

His book Hope or Despair (with Donald Warwick), a study of educational opportunity in primary schools in Pakistan drawing on a representative sample of schools, established the centrality of teacher quality, school leadership and the role of educational processes in creating different opportunity structures between students in urban and rural areas and across different provinces.

Education, Sustainable Development, and Shared Global Challenges

Reimers’s comparative research also examines how global frameworks influence national educational agendas. In The Sustainable Development Goals and Education: Achievements and Opportunities, he analyzes the contribution of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to educational development. The article considers not only measurable progress toward SDG 4, but also the way the goals increased ambition, encouraged coherence across sectors, and created a common framework for governments, development organizations, universities, and civil society. It also asks whether emerging challenges—including war, democratic decline, threats to human rights, climate change, and artificial intelligence—require the global education agenda to be revised and extended.

In Education Purposes for a Sustainable Future, Reimers argues that education is a purpose-driven ethical enterprise and that educational goals must be periodically reconsidered as societies change. Clear and shared purposes provide coherence across curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher development, leadership, and policy. In a period marked by climate change, democratic backsliding, inequality, and challenges to human rights, education systems must align what they teach and how they operate with the capabilities students need to build a sustainable and humane future.

A related study, Education and the Challenges for Democracy, reexamines the relationship between democracy and democratic education. Drawing on comparative analyses of Japan, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States, the work explores how democratic decline and social inequality constrain opportunities for civic learning—and how educational institutions might respond. It emphasizes that the relationship is reciprocal: the health of democracy shapes what schools can do, while the knowledge, dispositions, and experiences cultivated through education influence the future of democratic societies.

Learning from Education Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic created an unprecedented opportunity—and necessity—to study education systems comparatively in real time. With colleagues in UNESCO, Reimers led a study of emerging innovations to sustain educational opportunity during the pandemic which were sustained in the immediate aftermath, published in the book Learning to build back better futures for education. In Learning from the Frontlines of Educational Innovation during a Pandemic, Reimers with colleagues from the OECD and the World Bank analyzed educational innovations documented across 45 initiatives during the first wave of school closures. The cases include the use of digital platforms, television, radio, printed materials, teacher professional development, and social-emotional support. The study identifies the importance of collaboration across government, civil society, schools, universities, and private organizations, while also recognizing that these innovations could not fully compensate for the opportunities lost when schools closed.

His analysis of Oportunidades educativas y la pandemia de la COVID-19 en América Latina places the crisis within the longer history of educational expansion and reform in Latin America. Reimers characterizes the pandemic as the beginning of a new wave of regional educational transformation—one that widened opportunity gaps by social class and nationality, exposed the limited reach of many remote-learning strategies, and made the need for more relevant and resilient education systems even more urgent.

Adapting Innovation across National Contexts

A recurring question across Reimers’s research is how education systems can learn from one another without simply copying policies or programs. His foundational chapter Adapting Innovations Across Borders to Close Equity Gaps in Education, coauthored with North Cooc and Jodut Hashmi, argues that innovations travel successfully only through contextualized transfer. This requires identifying the essential principles of an innovation while redesigning its specific features in relation to local culture, institutions, politics, resources, and professional capacity. Comparative learning is therefore a process of interpretation, adaptation, and collaborative design rather than mechanical replication.

Research, Policy, and Comparative Learning

Reimers has also conducted comparative analyses of the relationship between research and education policy. His book (with Noel McGinn) Informed Dialogue examines how evidence is produced, interpreted, communicated, and used in policy decisions, and how researchers and decision-makers can engage in informed dialogue. It recognizes that evidence does not determine policy by itself: 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 reason about complex problems from multiple perspectives.

Reimers is also leading a collaborative study of the history of the International Academy of Education, of which he is a Fellow and elected president. 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 across national and regional contexts.

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 the assumption that any single country offers a universal model, and enables educators and policymakers to learn more thoughtfully from the experience of others. For Reimers, comparison is ultimately a means of expanding educational imagination and strengthening the capacity to design policies and institutions responsive both to the distinctive needs of particular societies and to the challenges they share.

Selected Comparative Education Publications

2024. The Quest for Educational Equity in Mexico. Daedalus, 153(4), 206-220.

2024. The Sustainable Development Goals and Education: Achievements and Opportunities. International Journal of Educational Development, 104, 102965.

2023. Education Purposes for a Sustainable Future. Prospects, 54(2), 285-292.

2023. Education and the Challenges for Democracy. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 31(102).

2022. Learning from the Frontlines of Educational Innovation during a Pandemic, in How Learning Continued during the COVID-19 Pandemic. OECD Publishing.

2021. Oportunidades educativas y la pandemia de la COVID-19 en América Latina. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación, 86(1), 9-23.

2018. Reformar la escuela pública para el siglo XXI: Los desafíos de México, in Fortalecer y ampliar nuestros derechos, afianzar nuestro régimen democrático y de libertades. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

2012. Adapting Innovations Across Borders to Close Equity Gaps in Education, with North Cooc and Jodut Hashmi, in Lessons in Educational Equality: Successful Approaches to Intractable Problems Around the World. Oxford University Press.