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Fernando M. Reimers
With contributions from:
Leading the Global Education Movement
ONE STUDENT
AT A TIME
“Whether you opened this book looking for practical guidance on how to address some of the most
critical issues in education or in search of powerful and inspiring tales of impact, you’re in luck. e
stories of wisdom, passion, and determination that Dr. Reimers has assembled here in this volume
make me both grateful for the work Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni are doing and
hopeful for the world they are building — one student at a time.” James E. Ryan, Dean of the
Faculty and Charles William Eliot Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“Fernando Reimers and his colleagues show us how we can preserve, sustain, and deepen the
values of democracy, liberalism, and human rights through a global education movement...one
that encourages citizens and leaders to challenge taboos, remain curious enough to learn, and
demonstrate strength through humility.” George Papandreou, former Primer Minister of Greece
and former Minister of Education
“is book provides fascinating insight into the trajectories of graduates from Harvard’s Graduate
School of Education International Education Policy Program. ey belong to a global education
movement that must be supported to fulll a fundamental human right and the most powerful
development catalyst at a time of complex change and accelerating globalization, one that more
than ever requires the nurturing of global citizens.” Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO
“ose are the leaders that shape education of the world. Learning about the journeys of those
leaders is critical for two reasons. First, because we need examples and inspiration about how to
better shape educational systems. And second because we need, urgently, more people like them.”
Jaime Saavedra Chanduvi, Education Sector Manager, World Bank and former Minister of
Education of Peru
“is is a highly readable and useful study of the challenges and opportunities that those advancing
education for all around the globe face. A must read for all education leaders interested in freedom
and justice” Arne Duncan. Former US Secretary of Education
“For any who doubt that international education can be transformative or worth the investment, be
prepared to be converted. And for all of us who need new talking points, read this book.”
Allan Goodman. President Institute for International Education
“One student at a time epitomizes the calling of true educators who see the urgency of getting
education to those who need it most.” TAN Oon Seng, Professor and Director, National Institute
of Education, Singapore
“e collective wisdom of this book is a great inspiration and a rich source of advice for every leader,
not only in education. It gives us practical insights into the key leadership competences needed in
a world of continuous learning and adaptation.” Dr. Antonella Mei-Pochtler. Senior Partner &
Managing Director e Boston Consulting Group
“Professor Reimers challenges the reader to reect seriously on how education can foster democracy
and a more peaceful world.” Dzingai Mutumbuka, former minister of education of Zimbabwe,
former ADEA Chair and former education sector manager at the World Bank.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement Fernando M. Reimers
Nour Abu Ragheb . Joel Adriance . Wilson Aiwuyor . Shatha AlHashmi . Zohal Atif .
Suman Barua . Sergio Cárdenas Denham . Mariali Cardenas Casanueva .
Manuel Cardoso . Mariam Chughtai . Gilda Colin . Peter Cooper . Mariana Clucellas .
Bettina Dembek . David Edwards . Nelly ElZayat . Erin Esparza .
Armando Estrada Zubía . Ana Florez . Soujanya Ganig . Luis E. Garcia de Brigard .
Eugenia Garduño . Emanuel Garza Fishburn . Juliana Guaqueta Ospina .
Ghazal S. Gulati . Anne Elizabeth Hand . Ming Jin . Kevin Kalra . Zahra Kassam .
Myra M. Khan . Susan Kippels . José La Rosa . Annika Lawrence . Sandra Licón .
Michael Lisman . Mingyan “Ophelia” Ma . Janhvi Maheshwari-Kanoria . Tara Mahtafar .
Luis Felipe Martínez-Gómez . Nicholas Moa . Jomphong Mongkhonvanit .
Eliana Carvalho Mukherjee . Lily Neyestani-Hailu . Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles .
Ana Gabriela Pessoa . Teresa Cozetti Pontual Pereira . Kevin Roberts . Haneen Sakakini .
Shajia Sarfraz . Colleen Silva-Hayden . Juan de Dios Simón . Daniel Tapia-Quintana .
Maya iagarajan . Ernesto Treviño . Leanne Trujillo . Pam Vachatimanont .
Ethan Van Drunen . Razia Velji . Jamie Vinson . Austin Volz . Elyse Katherine Watkins
i
One Student at a Time
Leading the Global Education
Movement
ii
iii
One Student at a Time
Leading the Global Education Movement
Fernando M. Reimers
With contributions from
Nour Abu Ragheb . Joel Adriance . Wilson Aiwuyor .
Shatha AlHashmi . Zohal Atif . Suman Barua .
Sergio Cárdenas Denham . Mariali Cardenas Casanueva .
Manuel Cardoso . Mariam Chughtai . Gilda Colin . Peter Cooper .
Mariana Clucellas . Bettina Dembek . David Edwards . Nelly ElZayat .
Erin Esparza . Armando Estrada Zubía . Ana Florez . Soujanya Ganig
Luis E. Garcia de Brigard . Eugenia Garduño .
Emanuel Garza Fishburn . Juliana Guaqueta Ospina .
Ghazal S. Gulati . Anne Elizabeth Hand . Ming Jin . Kevin Kalra .
Zahra Kassam . Myra M. Khan . Susan Kippels . José La Rosa .
Annika Lawrence . Sandra Licón . Michael Lisman .
Mingyan “Ophelia” Ma . Janhvi Maheshwari-Kanoria . Tara Mahtafar .
Luis Felipe Martínez-Gómez . Nicholas Moffa .
Jomphong Mongkhonvanit . Eliana Carvalho Mukherjee .
Lily Neyestani-Hailu . Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles .
Ana Gabriela Pessoa . Teresa Cozetti Pontual Pereira . Kevin Roberts .
Haneen Sakakini . Shajia Sarfraz . Colleen Silva-Hayden .
Juan de Dios Simón . Daniel Tapia-Quintana . Maya Thiagarajan .
Ernesto Treviño . Leanne Trujillo . Pam Vachatimanont .
Ethan Van Drunen . Razia Velji . Jamie Vinson .
Austin Volz . Elyse Katherine Watkins
v
“Whether you opened this book looking for practical guidance on
how to address some of the most critical issues in education or in
search of powerful and inspiring tales of impact, you’re in luck. The
stories of wisdom, passion, and determination that Dr. Reimers has
assembled here in this volume make me both grateful for the work
Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni are doing and hopeful
for the world they are building—one student at a time.”
James E. Ryan, Dean of the Faculty and Charles William Eliot
Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“The essays in this book challenge us to re-think leadership in a global
society characterized by fluidity, increased insecurity and inequality. At
a time when authoritarian, nativist, exclusivist, and arrogant leaders
emerge by exploiting fear, misogyny and xenophobia, this book
emphasizes the need for trust and cooperation amongst countries and
individuals. Cooperation without which humanity will not be able to
materialize the goal of sustainable societies. It highlights the case for
cultivating a generation of global citizens who know how to include
rather than exclude, respect rather than reject, listen rather than
pontificate. Fernando Reimers and his colleagues show us how we can
preserve, sustain, and deepen the values of democracy, liberalism, and
human rights through a global education movement...one that
encourages citizens and leaders to challenge taboos, remain curious
enough to learn, and demonstrate strength through humility. We CAN
deny the trappings — the hubris — of arbitrary power; this passionate
collection proves it. A testament to the great human potential and the
possibilities of our times, these are inspiring voices that provoke us to
remain optimistic!”
George Papandreou, former Prime Minister and former Minister of
Education of Greece.
“This is a highly readable and useful study of the challenges and
opportunities that those advancing education for all around the globe
face. A must read for all education leaders interested in freedom and
justice.
Arne Duncan, Former US Secretary of Education.
vi
“The book is an excellent example of how to assess the impact of an
educational program through the work of its graduates, a valuable
reading for those who work in higher education. The book presents an
ambitious graduate program that aims to influence the improvement
of educational systems around the world cultivating the leadership
capacities of the students. The description of the challenges that
these leaders take on as they transform education around the world as
teachers, project leaders and policy makers, provides the reader with
an engaging and informative outlook into the program’s
effectiveness.”
Cecilia Maria Velez White, President, Universidad de Bogota Jorge
Tadeo Lozano and former Minister of Education of Colombia.
“Preparing today's young people for the challenges of the 21st
century-rapid change, unpredictability, globalization, new technologies,
and political conflict-will require very different forms of education
than those that marked the 19th and the 20th centuries. There is an
enormous need throughout the world for a new generation of
educational innovators with the values, passion, professional training,
and experience to lead this process of global and national change,
while still realizing it must take root one student at a time. In this
important book we hear from many such young entrepreneurs about
their own learnings in leading educational change.”
Dr. Charles MacCormack, President Emeritus, Save the Children.
“This work both inspires and challenges those of us working in
education to reevaluate our role as global, political change-makers. It
situates the global roles of education within context of the profound
work of Professor Fernando Reimers and the work his students are
doing all over the world in a powerfully vulnerable and reflective way.
It is an incredible collection of leadership and policy lessons offered
through the biographies of some incredible leaders in the field who are
having a profound impact across the globe.”
Earl Martin Phalen, Founder and CEO of the George and Veronica
Phalen Leadership Academies.
vii
"The collective wisdom of this book is a great inspiration and a rich source
of advice for every leader, not only in education. It gives us practical
insights into the key leadership competences needed in a world of
continuous learning and adaptation. This vibrant global education
network is the best place to stand and a great lever to move the
world!”
Dr. Antonella Mei-Pochtler, Senior Partner & Managing Director, The
Boston Consulting Group.
“Fernando Reimers takes the title for this book from his wife, who
taught him that "the deepest way to educate is one student at a time."
As the long-serving director of the Harvard's Graduate School of
Education's master's program in International Education Policy,
Reimers has been one of the leaders of a global education movement,
which his students are taking forward, one educator at a time. In this
volume, sixty former students share hard-fought, universal lessons for
educators across the globe. One of my favorites is that we must
balance patience with setbacks and at the same time balance process
with impatience for results. Reimers’ larger lesson concerns the role of
higher education to prepare global citizens as defenders of democracy.
This is Reimers’ most personal volume to date as he encourages us all
to discover our common humanity through this work.”
Kathleen McCartney, President of Smith College.
“For any who doubt that international education can be
transformative or worth the investment, be prepared to be converted.
And for all of us who need new talking points, read this book.”
Allan Goodman, President, Institute for International Education.
“Universalizing education and making it a force for peace and
sustainability calls upon the knowledge of a constellation of leaders –
in schools, universities, civil society, the private sector, governments
and international organizations. This book provides fascinating insight
into the trajectories of graduates from Harvard’s Graduate School of
Education International Education Policy Program. Each one of them
is driven by a passionate commitment to leave no one behind and
viii
advance educational opportunities for all children and youth across the
world. In their own voice, they reflect on the challenges of innovation
and reform, of pushing the boundaries of teaching and learning in
their societies. They belong to a global education movement that must
be supported to fulfill a fundamental human right and the most
powerful development catalyst at a time of complex change and
accelerating globalization, one that more than ever requires the
nurturing of global citizens.”
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO.
“This vivid collection of experiences from the educational frontline is
a vital reminder of the compelling leadership contribution of those
who power and shape the impact of education in communities across
the world. Read it and catch an urgent vision of how we might build a
more connected and progressive global educational system with
incalculable benefit for society.”
Dame Julia Cleverdon Co- Founder of Step up To Serve in the UK.
"One student at a time epitomizes the calling of true educators who see
the urgency of getting education to those who need it most.
Responses to the multifarious contexts of education addressed in this
book are highly insightful and pragmatic - whether it be schooling,
organizational transformation, program development, policy or
governance. The anecdotes and cases make for excellent reading
— coming from a confluence of brilliant minds and inspired hearts
catalyzed by an outstanding professor who has impacted many
through his amazing care and scholarship.”
TAN Oon Seng, Professor and Director, National Institute of
Education, Singapore.
“This book is a testament to the power of intentional efforts to
cultivate educational leadership — leadership with the values,
mindsets, skills, and understandings to effect transformation,
leadership that is both locally rooted and globally informed. Read it to
gain insight into global education but even more so into what it will
take to develop a growing cadre of people who will reshape education
ix
across the world so that today's children can shape a better future for
themselves and all of us.”
Wendy Kopp, CEO & Co-founder, Teach For All.
“Education gives people the freedom to live the life of their
choosing. But the complex machinery that has to be put in place in
each country to give all people the education they deserve does not
develop spontaneously. It is not a natural consequence of
development. It is the cause of development. And in some countries
we see that machinery developing, and in others we don’t. Why?
Simple. Some societies decide to do it, and others don’t. And when
that happens, it is a process shaped by people. They are the
designers, engineers, architects and operators of that machinery.
Fernando Reimers shares with us the journeys and travails of such
designers, architects engineers and operators. Those are the leaders
that shape education of the world. Learning about the journeys of
those leaders is critical for two reasons. First, because we need
examples and inspiration about how to better shape educational
systems. And second because we need, urgently, more people like
them.”
Jaime Saavedra Chanduvi, Education Sector Manager, World Bank
and former Minister of Education of Peru.
“Imagine asking educational leaders from countries all over the world
to describe what their goals are, how much impact do they think they
have had, what challenges have they faced, and what lessons have they
drawn from these experiences. Some lead schools, others lead
government or international institutions, some have created their own
non-profit or for-profit organizations. All have in common that they
are graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Education where
they studied from the professor who invited them to write the
chapters for this shared edited book. Their insights, their
thoughtfulness, their extreme challenges in some cases, their successes,
the sweep of their vision, and the tenderness of the humility evident in
x
many, makes this a gripping book, a motivator of action, and a guide
toward a cosmopolitan educational transformation everywhere.”
Jorge I. Domínguez. Professor of Government, Harvard University.
“Moved by a speech by St. Theresa, the patron saint of Kolkata's
poor, a high school student from the USA asked what he could do to
assist. She responded "find your own Kolkata." This volume of essays
by education leaders demonstrates the infinite variety of education
Kolkatas in the global north and south. It is a must read for anyone
interested to help children and youth, especially those without
opportunity, get the education and training they need to succeed in the
21st century. Professor Reimers, challenges the reader to reflect
seriously on how education can foster democracy and a more peaceful
world.”
Dzingai Mutumbuka, former minister of education of Zimbabwe,
former ADEA Chair and former education sector manager at the
World Bank.
“An invaluable source of insights into the practical challenges of
improving education programs and systems across a range of cultural
and political contexts, this book offers intimate testimonies to how
cooperative education can dramatically change a person’s life and in so
doing, better the lives of countless others. It stands as a unique and
thrilling proof that persons working together can accomplish much
more than individuals alone.”
Noel McGinn, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Graduate School of
Education.
xi
To my sons Tomas and Pablo,
Who inspire me as they live lives of purpose
xii
xiii
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................... XXI
LEADING THE EXPANSION OF RELEVANT
EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES AROUND THE
WORLD ........................................................................................ 1
BY FERNANDO M. REIMERS .................................................................... 1
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1
A SILENT GLOBAL REVOLUTION WHICH TRANSFORMED HUMANITY
................................................................................................................... 13
THE GLOBAL EDUCATION MOVEMENT TO EDUCATE ALL CHILDREN
AND ITS FRAGILITY ................................................................................. 15
HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN PURPOSES OF PUBLIC
EDUCATION ............................................................................................. 19
THE CHALLENGES TO ALIGNING EDUCATION SYSTEMS WITH A
COSMOPOLITAN VISION OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY...................... 23
THE CHALLENGES TO THE TACIT LIBERAL VALUES THAT
UNDERGIRD GLOBAL EDUCATIONAL EXPANSION ............................. 25
THE EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF POPULISM .............................. 27
CAN THE INSTITUTIONS CREATED TO ADVANCE A LIBERAL WORLD
ORDER SAVE IT? ....................................................................................... 29
STUDYING LEADERSHIP IN THE GLOBAL EDUCATION MOVEMENT. 30
What do these education leaders do? ......................................................... 33
What impact do they have? ...................................................................... 39
What are the challenges they face? ............................................................ 42
Challenges are complex and capacity is limited… ............................... 42
It’s a system… ........................................................................................... 43
It takes time… ........................................................................................... 45
It’s all about the people… ....................................................................... 47
Mindsets matter… .................................................................................. 48
Trust is key… ........................................................................................ 50
Fear nothing… but fear itself… .............................................................. 51
WHAT ARE THE TRAJECTORIES OF THEIR CAREERS? ......................... 54
WHAT LESSONS HAVE THEY LEARNED? .............................................. 56
xiv
Lead ethically. ......................................................................................... 56
Understand the education challenge you are trying to solve. ........................ 58
To understand the challenge, understand the people involved. Map key
stakeholders. ........................................................................................... 59
Understanding how to solve an education challenge requires continuous
learning. .................................................................................................. 60
Learning from action and from failure .................................................. 61
Learning with others and from others ................................................... 63
Collaboration is key to learn and to act. There are opportunities in Collective
Leadership. ............................................................................................. 64
Collaboration requires good personal relationships. ................................... 65
Attend to execution and to the details of getting the work done. ................ 66
Communication is critical to learning and to execution. ............................. 67
Balancing patience with setbacks and processes, with impatience for results. 67
Educating for a new kind of leadership .................................................... 68
Changing my mind about how to educate leaders of the global education
movement ................................................................................................ 71
SCHOOLS ................................................................................... 89
BACK TO PRESCHOOL ............................................................................ 91
By Kevin Kalra ....................................................................................... 91
AT MY CORE, I AM A TEACHER. ........................................................... 97
By Maya Thiagarajan ............................................................................. 97
LEADING CHANGE BY BECOMING A TEACHER ............................... 103
By Mingyan “Ophelia” Ma .................................................................. 103
LEADING FROM MY ROOTS: CREATING SAFE SPACES FOR
STUDENTS IN PALESTINIAN CLASSROOMS ........................................ 107
By Haneen Sakakini ............................................................................ 107
BRINGING EXCELLENT EDUCATION TO UNDERSERVED CHILDREN
IN INDIA ................................................................................................. 113
By Suman Barua .................................................................................. 113
NAVIGATING A PLACE IN GLOBAL EDUCATION ............................. 119
By Austin Volz ................................................................................... 119
PROMOTING TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ............. 123
xv
By Ming Jin .......................................................................................... 123
BUILDING INSTITUTIONS THAT ELICIT GREATNESS ....................... 127
By Ethan Van Drunen ........................................................................ 127
DEVELOPING PROGRAMS AND PRODUCTS .................. 133
EMPOWERING YOUTH TO DRIVE SOCIAL CHANGE ........................ 135
By Joel Adriance ................................................................................... 135
IMPROVING CHILDREN’S READING SKILLS AND HABITS IN
MARGINALIZED AREAS OF MEXICO .................................................. 139
By Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles ............................................................. 139
SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SKILLS FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY ................................................................................................ 143
By Gilda Colin ..................................................................................... 143
PREPARING EGYPTIAN STUDENTS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION AND
PROMOTING LEARNER-CENTERED TEACHING IN EGYPT ............. 147
By Nelly ElZayat ................................................................................. 147
IMPROVING ACCESS TO QUALITY EDUCATION THROUGH
TECHNOLOGY ....................................................................................... 151
By Pam Vachatimanont ....................................................................... 151
DEVELOPING INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS TO EXPAND EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITY ....................................................................................... 155
By Ana Gabriela Pessoa ....................................................................... 155
LEADING EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION IN THE ARAB WORLD ..... 159
By Shatha AlHashmi ........................................................................... 159
CREATING ORGANIZATIONS ............................................ 163
A DECADE AFTER HGSE: BUILDING ORGANIZATIONS TO EMPOWER
CHILDREN AND YOUTH ........................................................................ 165
By Luis E Garcia de Brigard................................................................ 165
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR
DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN MEXICO ................. 171
By Mariali Cárdenas Casanueva ........................................................... 171
EMPOWERING PARENTS OF FIRST GENERATION LEARNERS IN
INDIA ...................................................................................................... 177
xvi
By Ghazal S. Gulati ............................................................................ 177
CREATING AN ORGANIZATION TO INCREASE THE RELEVANCE OF
WHAT IS TAUGHT IN MEXICAN SCHOOLS .......................................... 181
By Armando Estrada-Zubía ................................................................ 181
CREATING ORGANIZATIONS TO FOSTER EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITY IN MEXICO .................................................................. 187
By Emanuel Garza Fishburn ............................................................... 187
EDUCATION REFORM AND YOUTH DEVELOPMENT IN JORDAN AND
THE MIDDLE EAST ............................................................................... 193
By Nour Abu Ragheb .......................................................................... 193
THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATION TO EMPOWER PEOPLE IN
MEXICO .................................................................................................. 199
By Daniel Tapia-Quintana................................................................... 199
HIGHER EDUCATION ......................................................... 203
CONNECTING RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: NETWORKS TO IMPROVE
THE DISTRIBUTION OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES ............... 205
By Sergio Cárdenas Denham ................................................................ 205
IMPLEMENTING EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AT A SCALE ......... 209
By Eugenia Garduño ............................................................................ 209
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY IN COLOMBIA, A
MULTI-SECTOR CHALLENGE .............................................................. 213
By Luis Felipe Martínez-Gómez .......................................................... 213
PROMOTING MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND IMPROVING
EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES FOR MARGINALIZED STUDENTS IN THE
UNITED STATES .................................................................................... 219
By Eliana Carvalho Mukherjee ............................................................ 219
RESHAPING EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT TO MAKE EDUCATION
RELEVANT IN CANADA ........................................................................ 225
By Elyse Katherine Watkins................................................................. 225
REIMAGING THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION OF TOMORROW: A
THEORY OF IMPACT FOR CHILDREN IN PAKISTAN ......................... 229
By Mariam Chughtai ........................................................................... 229
xvii
INCREASING ACCESS TO TECHNICAL AND VOCATIONAL
EDUCATION IN THAILAND .................................................................. 235
By Jomphong Mongkhonvanit ................................................................ 235
PROMOTING UNDERSTANDING OF MUSLIM HERITAGES AND
CULTURE ................................................................................................ 239
By Razia Velji ..................................................................................... 239
PROMOTING EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION IN MEXICO
................................................................................................................. 245
By Erin Esparza .................................................................................. 245
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY THROUGH THE
ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE ..................................................... 251
By Ernesto Treviño ............................................................................... 251
GOVERNMENT ...................................................................... 255
RETHINKING BRAZIL’S BASIC EDUCATION CURRICULUM ............. 257
By Teresa Cozetti Pontual Pereira ......................................................... 257
INCREASING THE VALUE OF THE TEACHING PROFESSION IN PERU
................................................................................................................. 263
By José La Rosa ................................................................................... 263
ADVANCING THE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES OF RURAL
INDIGENOUS YOUTH IN GUATEMALA............................................... 267
By Juan de Dios Simón ......................................................................... 267
SUPPORTING TEACHER EDUCATION IN ARGENTINA ..................... 273
By Mariana Clucellas ........................................................................... 273
LEVERS FOR CHANGE: SYSTEM STRENGTHENING IN THE GULF AND
LEVANT COUNTRIES ............................................................................ 277
By Tara Mahtafar ................................................................................ 277
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ................................. 281
THE PARTNERSHIP APPROACH TO SYSTEMS STRENGTHENING: A
PROMISING MODEL FOR IMPROVING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY
AROUND THE WORLD .......................................................................... 283
By Wilson Aiwuyor .............................................................................. 283
xviii
ADVANCING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS: A PATH TO
MEANINGFUL LEARNING FOR ALL .................................................... 291
By Lily Neyestani-Hailu ...................................................................... 291
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY WITH THE UNITED
STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID)
................................................................................................................. 295
By Kevin Roberts .................................................................................. 295
RAISING LITERACY LEVELS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE
CARIBBEAN ............................................................................................ 299
By Michael Lisman .............................................................................. 299
IMPROVING EDUCATION IN MYANMAR BY ENHANCING TEACHER
COMPETENCY ........................................................................................ 303
By Jamie Vinson .................................................................................. 303
ENSURING EQUAL ACCESS TO EDUCATION IN MYANMAR ............ 309
By Annika Lawrence ........................................................................... 309
USING EVIDENCE TO ADVANCE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY . 313
By Nicholas Moffa................................................................................ 313
RETHINKING ASSESSMENT TO FOCUS GOVERNMENTS’ ATTENTION
ON WHAT MATTERS .............................................................................. 317
By Manuel Cardoso .............................................................................. 317
SHAPING GLOBAL EDUCATION POLICIES WITH MINISTRIES AND
GOVERNMENTS .................................................................................... 323
By Myra M. Khan ............................................................................... 323
BUILDING PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS TO IMPROVE
EDUCATION SYSTEMS .......................................................................... 327
By Juliana Guaqueta Ospina ................................................................ 327
CONSULTING......................................................................... 333
IMPROVING ACCESS, QUALITY, AND RELEVANCE OF EDUCATION
FOR PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STUDENTS IN MIDDLE AND LOW
INCOME COUNTRIES ............................................................................ 335
By Ana Florez ..................................................................................... 335
xix
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS WITH
DISABILITIES AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS ...................... 339
By Leanne Trujillo ................................................................................ 339
WORKING TO ADVANCE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES AROUND
THE WORLD IN WAYS BIG AND SMALL ............................................. 345
by Bettina Dembek ............................................................................... 345
ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR REFUGEES AND
DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN FROM AFGHANISTAN ....................... 351
By Zohal Atif ....................................................................................... 351
LEADING COLLABORATIONS TO ADDRESSING EDUCATIONAL
INEQUITY ............................................................................................... 357
By Shajia Sarfraz ................................................................................. 357
GLOBAL NON PROFITS ....................................................... 361
LEADING TEACHER ORGANIZATIONS TO PROFESSIONALIZE
EDUCATION PRACTICE ........................................................................ 363
By David Edwards ............................................................................... 363
PROMOTING LITERACY AND EDUCATION FOR GIRLS IN AFRICA
AND ASIA ................................................................................................ 371
By Peter Cooper .................................................................................... 371
THE IMPORTANCE OF PROMOTING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN
SCHOOLS IN INDIA ................................................................................ 375
By Soujanya Ganig ............................................................................... 375
PROMOTING UNIVERSITY INNOVATION IN LATIN AMERICA AND
THE CARIBBEAN .................................................................................... 379
By Colleen Silva-Hayden ....................................................................... 379
FOUNDATIONS...................................................................... 383
INTRODUCING A SENSE OF POSSIBILITY IN STUDENTS AND
EDUCATORS ........................................................................................... 385
By Janhvi Maheshwari-Kanoria ............................................................ 385
EMPOWERING LEADERS TO ADVANCE EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL STUDENTS ................................................... 393
xx
By Sandra Licón .................................................................................. 393
FACING OUR FAILURE TO PROMOTE PLURALISM ............................ 397
By Zahra Kassam ................................................................................. 397
HONESTY AND TRANSPARENCY ARE NECESSARY IN THE
EDUCATION SECTOR ............................................................................ 401
By Anne Elizabeth Hand .................................................................... 401
SHAPING POLICY THROUGH RESEARCH IN THE UNITED ARAB
EMIRATES .............................................................................................. 405
By Susan Kippels .................................................................................. 405
xxi
Acknowledgements
This book examines how graduates of the International Education
Policy Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education advance
educational opportunity around the world, and how they overcome the
challenges of leading change in educational institutions. I owe much
gratitude first to those who made and make this program possible, and
then to those who helped me write the book itself.
The International Education Policy Program at Harvard exists, first and
foremost, because a group of dedicated and talented professionals each
year trust us to help them develop the necessary skills to advance the
expansion of relevant educational opportunities to all of the world’s
children and youth. I thank them most sincerely for their commitment
to this work and for trusting us to educate them.
My colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who teach
these students, those who have taught in the program in the past, and
my colleagues in the administration of the school who provide all the
necessary support to make this program possible, have my deepest
gratitude. I am also indebted to my colleagues in the field of
international education who welcome these students as their junior
colleagues upon graduation. Many of these colleagues contribute to the
education of these students in numerous ways, as mentors, attending
student conferences, providing internships, or simply offering guidance
on ways to strengthen the program. Supporting the students who
graduate from the International Education Policy Program takes this
large community bound together in our shared understanding that
education is a human right, and that achieving this right requires
preparing professionals who work every day to educate all children well.
It is the legacy of those who preceded us in advancing international
education at Harvard that makes the work we do possible and I count
my blessings in being able to build on that legacy.
There are so many individuals I would have to mention in expressing
my gratitude for their support, that it is best that I say simply that I
know full well that it takes a village to educate these leaders of global
xxii
education, and that I thank everyone at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education, and our friends and colleagues around the University and
beyond, for their contributions to this shared labor of love.
I am also deeply appreciative to those colleagues who helped with the
study presented in this book and with the writing. First, I thank the
graduates of the International Education Policy Program who took the
time to respond to the survey I administered about their work, impact
and challenges, and to those among them who, in addition, wrote the
essays presented in the book. I am also grateful to Benjamin Alford and
to Ana Teresa del Toro for their valuable research assistance analyzing
the content of the essays, to Kristin Foster for her excellent help editing
and preparing the manuscript for publication and to Paulo Costa for the
design of the book cover. I greatly appreciate the generosity of those
colleagues who took the time to read the manuscript and write
endorsements.
At home I thank my sons Tomas and Pablo who, since its inception,
embraced the International Education Policy Program as it grew into
my life. Their respect for my students, and for their work, their curiosity
and advice about issues big and small pertaining to leading the program
provided valuable sustenance over the last twenty years. I will always be
grateful for their help, as they grew up and until they went to college,
on a wide range of subjects, from assisting during the many receptions
we hosted for students and colleagues at home, to discussing with me
the feedback my students provided in course evaluations. I treasure
memories of many insights that I drew from conversations with each of
them. I remember Tomas, who just graduated from college, one early
morning while he was in the second grade walking into my home office
curious about what I was writing, a paper examining the literacy
experiences of low income students in school based on a student survey.
As I explained the study to him he said with brilliant simplicity ‘and if
some of these students are not very good readers, how do you know
how they understood the questions in your questionnaire?’. More
recently, as I was writing this book, Pablo, now a rising junior in college,
offered insightful ideas on whether the impact of graduates who taught
directly was comparable to the impact of those influencing policy. I have
been incredibly fortunate that both of them attended Harvard College,
providing me with the joy of their frequent company over the last few
xxiii
years. I have enjoyed that they have both been at home the last few
weeks of writing this book, as Tomas is packing to move to New York
City, and appreciated the humor in the family joke of counting how
many minutes in a conversation until dad brings up this book. Just as
students educate their teachers, children educate their parents and I
have been immensely fortunate to have both wonderful and generous
students as well as two sons who have made me a better person, teacher
and father, and given me much purpose and happiness.
My biggest gratitude, as always, is to my wife and colleague, Eleonora
Villegas-Reimers. She is the person who helped me understand, when
we first met — and over the thirty-four years I have been in love with
her — that we have the greatest impact in education one student at a
time. She is also the most helpful supporter of projects big and small in
which I have embarked myself and both of us, including this one. For
her patience during the long days when I would get up at 4.30am in the
morning and stay up late working on this book, and speak about little
else until the book was finished, I am most grateful. I don’t know how
to thank her for her love these past 34 years other than to hope for a
long life together.
Fernando Reimers
Cambridge, Massachusetts July 2017
xxiv
1
Leading the expansion of relevant educational
opportunities around the world
by Fernando M. Reimers
Introduction
I have long thought that education, the intentional creation of
opportunities for others to gain knowledge and skills that expand their
freedoms, is a wonderful privilege and a great invention. While I have
learned to provide a rational justification for the importance of
education, I know that I feel its importance in my heart. This may be
because I realized early in life how lucky I was to be able to study, or
because I was fortunate to have parents who valued learning and
supported my education. Maybe it was because I had good teachers. Or
it could be because at some point in my schooling I realized my parents
were sacrificing so I could have more education than they themselves
had.
I was 12 years old when I began to understand how transformative
education could be. My mother, who was a very active participant of
the parent teacher association of the school I attended in Caracas,
persuaded the principal that he should invest in a few typewriters, so
that the students in the school would learn some useful skills to help
them get jobs. My mother was a secretary, so it made sense to her that
learning to type would give us some advantages in the job market. The
school I attended ended in the ninth grade; it did not offer the full
twelve grades of instruction required to finish high school. I suppose
many of the students in my school, and in my neighborhood, ended
their studies in the ninth grade, at which point they got a job. Many of
us understood it was a privilege to complete nine grades of schooling,
as there were plenty of children our ages already working, some helping
in the local businesses which flanked the streets in my neighborhood.
Others packed groceries in the local markets, carrying bags for
customers to receive tips. Still others, probably not living in the
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
2
neighborhood, shined shoes or sold newspapers on the street. So, at the
age of 12, I considered myself lucky to be in school.
I did not feel so lucky when my mother signed me up to join typing
lessons alongside a group of nine girls in an afterschool class. As the
instigator of the idea of offering such lessons, my mother may have
thought her own son would have to be in the first group of students to
learn these valuable skills. Needless to say, I did not see eye to eye with
my mother on the value of spending my afterschool time in that way. I
found the exercise of learning to type without looking at the keyboard
boring. Being the only boy among nine girls in a typing class did not
exactly conform to the gendered norms that ruled our pre-adolescent
lives. But my mother was a force to be reckoned with. She had worked
hard to instill in us the notion that we should live according to our
conscience and not by social expectations and I knew that it would be
futile to bring up the views of my peers. Also, it was not as if I had much
choice over the matter, as twelve year olds in Venezuela in those days
typically followed their parents’ designs for them without quibble.
So over several months, which felt like an eternity, I spent an hour a
couple of afternoons a week with the nine girls in the small cafeteria of
the school, where we laid our typewriters on a long table, sat in long
benches on both sides, and typed away page after page “A,” “S,” “D,”
“F,” with the left hand, and then “N,” “L,” “K,” “J,” with the right,
each letter with a different finger. And then we moved to type the keys
on the upper row on the keyboard, and then the lower row. We had to
type without looking at the keyboard until, as a result of repeated and
monotonous practice, those keys had become to our brains an
extension of our fingers, their location known the way we know how to
keep our balance on a bike. Then we were tested for speed and taught
to type fast. Progressively, it felt as if our eyes could see the typebars
print the letters on a blank sheet of paper on direct command by our
thoughts.
My mother had personally negotiated with the vendor the purchase of
these typewriters on behalf of the school, persuading the store to
provide the school with a significant discount over the retail price. For
my pains, enduring the sarcastic questions of my classmates about
whether I was looking forward to becoming a secretary, my Christmas
present that year was… a typewriter. An Olivetti Lettera portable
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
3
manual typewriter, with a shiny plastic gray frame in its own suitcase. It
was identical to those ten typewriters on which I had learned to type,
which we took out of their cases two afternoons a week, to practice for
an hour until we had memorized the location of each key. My mother
explained she had been able to purchase it at the same discount that the
vendor had extended to the school for the ten typewriters. Given that
my Christmas gift was normally a book – one book – I understood
immediately how vested my mother was in my typing skills as I could
figure out that the cost of this typewriter was significantly greater than
the cost of a book. So I began then to type and, in a way, I have not
stopped since. Learning that skill shaped the course of the rest of my
life in ways I could not have foreseen then.
I first typed letters to my grandparents and my cousins who lived in
Spain, from where my parents had immigrated to Venezuela. I wrote
several letters a week to my relatives and became a regular in the local
post office. Since it took a couple of weeks for the letters to travel from
Venezuela to Spain, and the same amount of time for the reply letters
to return, I often had several letters “out” and received letters in reply
not to the last letter, but to ones written a few letters back. I kept a log
of the content of my letters to my various correspondents, the most
consistent of which were my grandfather and one cousin, and asked
them to reference the date of my correspondence in their reply, so I
could know which of my several letters they were referencing.
I did enjoy corresponding with my family, especially because we did not
own a telephone (international phone call costs would have been
prohibitively expensive anyway) and I became the carrier of news from
the family abroad to my parents and younger brother, and the carrier of
home news to my relatives. However, as a means of communication,
the long delay in the feedback loop made correspondence with Spain
less than satisfying. I explored new genres unsuccessfully. I attempted
to write a children’s story but found no audience for it at home or
school. I tried typing poetry, but found penmanship more suitable for
this. In these explorations one day, I wrote a short essay and asked my
teacher if she could post it on the bulletin board in the classroom, so
that my classmates could read it. Since this was a very small school, the
principal visited each classroom often. He remarked on my first essay,
and a week later on my second essay. The principal then asked me
whether I would want to publish a newspaper. He took me to a small
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
4
room where he kept a mimeograph. He explained to me how to type in
the stencils, and gave me ten stencils. For the entire school year, every
week, I met him for fifteen minutes as he ran fifty copies of my
newspaper, which I would then sell so we could pay for the cost of the
stencils and the ink. I learned valuable things in these fifteen minutes of
attention from my principal. He suggested I might increase demand for
the newspaper if I had other students write in it too, so I became an
editor as well as a scribe for those classmates interested in writing a
story. This may have also propped up demand for the typing classes.
These conversations with the principal opened doors I could not have
imagined. He invited me to enter into a national competition organized
by the Ministry of Education on the occasion of the 500th anniversary
of the birth of Nicolas Copernicus. The terms of the competition were
to explain the significance of his contributions to Astronomy. Even
though my knowledge of both Astronomy and Copernicus was pretty
much non-existent at the time, my principal explained that since I knew
how to type, and had experience writing by now, I could write an essay.
He also pointed out that I enjoyed reading as I had read most of the
books available in the school library, two bookcases about six feet tall
located in his office. So I read everything I could about Copernicus.
There was not much in our small school library and there was no public
library anywhere near my home (it was only when I transferred to
another school, at the end of high school, that I first visited a public
library). There were books in my home but none about Copernicus. So
I enlisted my friends and fellow writers in the school newspaper in
finding everything they could on Copernicus, and together we put
together a modest dossier of newspaper clippings about the man and
the model of the universe he had formulated. The occasion of the 500th
anniversary of his birth helped, as newspapers published several
accounts of his life and contributions. Armed with that dossier of
newspaper clippings and with a lot of cross-referencing in an
encyclopedia in the school, I was able to metaphorically transport
myself to Poland five centuries earlier and imagine how his discovery of
a heliocentric solar system would have been received in his times. I
found the use of the encyclopedia particularly helpful, as it drove me to
make connections across topics, allowing me to imagine what the
implications of those relationships might have been. I felt like a
Sherlock Holmes of sorts, one of my favorite books at the time, drawing
timelines of seemingly random historical facts, hypothesizing
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
5
connections between them, and then searching further in the
encyclopedia for ways to test those hypotheses. That project became
the center of my attention for several months, and typing my final essay
gave me more pleasure than anything I had written up to that point. I
mailed my essay to the Ministry of Education to the address provided
by the principal. Some months later I received a notification from the
Ministry informing me that I had won the contest, a full scholarship to
finish high school studies in Poland, courtesy of the Polish government.
My mother would have none of my travelling to Poland at the age of 14
to finish my high school in Polish, so I had to call the Ministry of
Education and explain, somewhat sheepishly, that I would not be able
to accept the award. It was kind of embarrassing, especially as I had to
first explain this to the principal and then make the call to the Ministry
from the principal’s office, with him and his secretary present, obviously
disappointed. I had a hard time following my mother’s reasoning in
making me turn down the scholarship, given how much she valued
education. I did, however, receive an alternative prize directly from the
hands of the Minister of Education of Venezuela: a diploma and a
cassette recorder. More importantly the awards were given at a special
ceremony in the planetarium of a big park, after a show which explained
the highlights of Copernicus’s contribution. My principal was so proud
that he packed my entire class, and a few other classes, in a school bus
and brought us all to the event. At the event, I sat next to another
student from another school who proudly told me he had won the first
prize: a scholarship to study in Poland! I didn’t have the heart to tell him
he should have thanked my mother! But, even though I could not
receive the prize I had won, the entire affair felt pretty good for a
consolation second prize. I still keep a picture of the Minister of
Education shaking my hand, giving me a diploma, next to my principal
whose smile would make you think he had won the prize himself. My
classmates enjoyed the visit to the planetarium and the recorder helped
me enhance the newspaper operation, as I now could record interviews.
I also began to record one hour tapes with family news, in which I
interviewed my parents and my brother and then mailed to my
grandparents.
When the principal then invited me during my last year in the school to
apply to another national competition, this time to write an essay about
Antonio Jose de Sucre, one of the leaders of the Independence
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
6
Movement in Venezuela, it was an easy decision for me. I now knew
how to research a topic with relatively limited access to bibliographic
sources, how to write an essay, how to type it and how to mail it. I even
knew how to politely decline the award should it not meet with my
mother’s approval. Plus my typing skills had improved considerably as
a result of hundreds of letters and many newspapers published every
week over many months. I also had developed a taste for historical
research, my version of Sherlock Holmes cracking cases of the distant
past. I had learned to enjoy establishing and imagining relationships
between historical developments in various fields of human activity and
across places. I won that contest too. This time I could receive the prize,
a voucher to purchase books of my choosing at a bookstore specializing
in academic books, for an amount about twice the cost of the typewriter,
which funded my first scholarly library, an eclectic collection consisting
of about fifty books in history, literature, philosophy and science
assembled with the help of the knowledgeable bookstore owner.
I suppose it was the fact that it had given my school principal some
pleasure to see me win those prizes, or maybe that he had enjoyed
watching me launch the school newspaper, that caused him to call my
parents to a meeting to discuss my educational future. Before that
meeting I would have been uncertain about what the next steps would
be after completing the ninth grade in that school. The outcome of that
conversation was that at the end of that school year, upon completion
of the ninth grade, I transferred to a very good school far away from
my home. It was a school with a very good reputation, particularly in
preparing people who wanted to study law, which my principal had
suggested I should do.
I would travel about two hours each way to school every day, taking
two different buses and then walking 20 minutes from the last bus stop
to the school as it was off the public transportation route. The intended
plan that I would finish high school there and then go to law school
made sense to me, even though I did not know any lawyers or have
access to anyone who had gone to college: Neither of my parents had
attended college and I don’t think anyone in the apartment building
where I lived did either. But I knew that law school was what people
who got involved in politics did, and my principal had told me several
times, during those conversations when we printed the 50 newspaper
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
7
copies, that I would be a good politician. I think he meant it as a
compliment!
The school was amazing. The curriculum of the school was, as were
many of the faculty, very progressive. The school had originally been
established by Spanish political refugees who had left Spain during
Franco’s dictatorship. The founder had taught in the Instituto Escuela in
Madrid, a progressive institution committed to a liberal arts education
and to the promotion of critical thinking. He had modeled the Instituto
Escuela in Caracas after it. In time, he transferred the school to one of
the teachers, and eventually they moved from the original location in an
older part of the city to a new development in the suburbs.
It was to that new location that I travelled every day. The school sat
atop a mountain in one of Caracas’ most exclusive residential
neighborhoods. The daughters of the President of the country, and of
several members of the cabinet, attended that school. Many of the
children, those who did not live within walking distance, were driven to
school, some by their parents, others by chauffeurs, some came on the
school bus. Since my home was very far away from the school bus route,
I relied on public transportation. The school had extraordinary athletic
fields and facilities, a track, basketball courts, volleyball courts and a
soccer field. The library took up the equivalent of six or eight of the
classrooms in my previous school and had a full-time librarian. The
teachers were outstanding, and some of them taught in university part-
time. One of them was a published poet. Another made us read the daily
newspapers and debate the news in class. Another was fascinated by
politics and talked about recent political developments, particularly
those concerning the transition to democracy which had taken place the
year I was born, as if they were the outcome of the actions of his friends
and neighbors – they probably were! Many of them assigned us research
papers and it was for that purpose that I first visited the national library.
It was a wonderful school in many ways. Even the long commute was
a blessing, as it helped me learn to read in moving vehicles, which has
served me well throughout life. So I read many of the books in the
school library on my journey to and from school, and I learned about
my city, as I looked out the window during that two-hour journey
travelling through Caracas.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
8
One of the books I read during my long commute was “The Revolution
of Intelligence” by Luis Alberto Machado, a short text published in
1975, my junior year in high school.
1
The thesis of the book was simple:
people are not born smart; they become smart as a result of education.
I loved that thesis, perhaps because I found it reaffirming given my own
insecurities about whether I belonged in that school. My first term I had
failed most subjects and the principal called my father in to discuss the
matter. This was deeply embarrassing as I had thought, given the
amount of time I spent studying and my academic performance in my
previous school, that I was a good student. The notion that effort and
opportunity, and not genes or social origin, were what caused people to
be smart was, in some ways, liberating. I clearly benefited from the
power of that idea as my academic performance improved and I
graduated as valedictorian of my class.
I did not, however, go to law school, which caused some of my teachers
consternation. Two events led to my change of heart. It was not that I
had any doubts about my ability to go to college or to study law. All
students at the Instituto Escuela went to college and I benefited from that
ethos. The school had a wonderful counseling department where
dedicated professionals met with us to help us decide on what we
wanted to study. For a student like me, the counseling department was
particularly helpful. It enabled me to provide an answer to my father’s
good question about how much college was going to cost when I first
announced that I was planning to attend.
One of the causes of my change of heart was the publication by Luis
Alberto Machado, and the discussions it was generating. In several
interviews about the book Machado argued that if people become smart
as a result of opportunity, it is an obligation of a democratic state to
create such opportunities, a thesis he would subsequently develop in
another book.
2
I found that thesis captivating. Perhaps it resonated so
strongly because I read it as I was studying history and sociology. Or
1
Luis Alberto Machado. La Revolución de la Inteligencia. Barcelona: Seix
Barral. 1975.
2
Luis Alberto Machado. El Derecho a Ser Inteligente. Barcelona: Seix
Barral. 1978.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
9
perhaps it echoed the stark inequities I witnessed as I travelled through
the city, passing by slums in the mountains on my way to one of Caracas’
most elite institutions. Or perhaps it reflected the influence of some of
my teachers, including my literature teacher whose strong commitment
to social justice resonated in her poetry as much as in her classes.
Perhaps it was my history teacher that made me feel that the fledgling
democratic experiment was the result of what ordinary people did.
Maybe it was my photography teacher who encouraged me to do a series
of photos of working children in my neighborhood for a school exhibit.
Whatever the reason, the book fueled my desire to enable people from
all backgrounds to develop their talent.
The second reason was more private, and not one that I am particularly
proud of. I did not share it with anyone at the time. The day after it had
been announced that I would be receiving the graduation award as
valedictorian, as we were lining up to walk into our classrooms, one of
my classmates asked me what my plans were upon graduation. I told
him I was going to law school. “Do you know what that means?” he
asked “Do you know what a lawyer does, or how to get a job as a
lawyer?” I did not respond. It was obvious that I didn’t. “Look around,”
he said, “all of us have relatives who practice law. My father owns the
law firm his father established. So-and-so’s father is a partner in a law
firm, so is so-and-so.” He explained that they were all going to work
with their relatives and would, in time, be partners in those firms their
families owned. He explained in a way that sounded as if he was trying
to be helpful, that my best bet if I wanted to become a lawyer would be
to work for him or another of my classmates, for the alternative would
be to work as a clerk in a lower court for most of my life, in hopes of
one day moving up through the ranks.
I was not certain what he was trying to accomplish offering avuncular
advice, but I could not understand why my career prospects would have
more to do with the family ties or the wealth of my classmates than with
my skills and effort. But, since his grandfather was a prominent lawyer
and politician who had served several times as a member of the cabinet
and his father was a prominent lawyer, I assumed my classmate knew
what he was talking about. So, without consulting with anyone else, I
changed my mind and decided I would not be going to law school. I
went to the counseling department and asked them to help me figure
out what I could study that would help me advance educational
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
10
opportunities for all. I did not have much time, as I would have to take
a college entrance examination soon. My counselors were not pleased,
and it took me several meetings to get them to understand that I was
not asking for permission but for help in carrying out a decision I had
already made. I was going to follow my conscience even if it
disappointed everyone in that school.
Once I had a plan, I notified my parents that I was going to study
psychology, which was the science that would help me figure out how
to make everybody smart. That is what I did, enrolling at the
Universidad Central de Venezuela, the oldest public university in the
country. I was lucky that tuition was free, and the education I received
was wonderful. Incidentally, Luis Alberto Machado was appointed
Secretary for the Development of Human Intelligence in 1979, as I was
in college, and advanced many programs to foster the cognitive
development of the population. This reaffirmed my emerging
understanding that ideas can, in time, change the world.
Since the day I made the decision that I would work to create the
conditions necessary to help people develop their talent, this is what I
have strived to do. Over the last twenty years, I have done this primarily
as a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
While this is not exactly the path I had charted that day in high school
when I changed my mind about going to law school, or even the path I
had imagined when I graduated college, it has been an enjoyable and
fulfilling journey.
One of the things I have done over the last twenty years is to help
graduate students prepare to advance educational opportunities for all
children around the world. Soon after arriving at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, I led the design of a master’s program in
international education policy. Each year, the program recruits students
who are committed to empowering learners to not only become
architects of their own lives but also to become contributing members
of their communities. It gives me great joy to work with these graduate
students and, especially, to follow their careers after they graduate. I stay
in touch with many of my former students, and make a point each year
to reach out to about 100 graduates, in my travels or by correspondence
(yes, those typing lessons still serve me well), or now by Skype or phone.
In these conversations I ask them what they do and what they find
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
11
challenging, and I welcome their advice about how we can better
prepare those who are following in their footsteps.
I draw satisfaction from being able to do this work at Harvard, the
institution where I pursued graduate studies in education. This school
opened for me opportunities I could not have imagined when I was
learning to type or reading books during my long commutes to high
school. Working to help advance the Harvard Graduate School of
Education’s mission feels as if I am paying back what I have received,
in a way that is both a great pleasure and a great privilege.
Becoming a Harvard professor in 1998 was not the path I imagined
when I arrived at this school as a graduate student in 1983. At that time,
I had just finished a short stint as a faculty member at the Universidad
Central de Venezuela, upon completion of my undergraduate studies. I
was teaching experimental psychology and doing research on ways to
stimulate the creativity of preschool children. I saw very few
connections between the teaching and research in that school and the
large and exciting programs to foster intelligence that the Minister for
the Development of Human Intelligence was advancing. I could not
understand why we weren’t all part of that ambitious national program.
Additionally, as I began to teach experimental psychology, one of my
former professors recommended me for a part-time consulting position
with a firm that was helping a state government understand how to
better align the curriculum of a technical institute with workplace needs.
I began to discover that the links between experimental research and
creating opportunities for all students to develop their talent could be
tenuous, and realized I was more interested in helping to improve the
functioning of education institutes so people could get jobs. I concluded
that the path between experimental research and creating opportunities
for all students to develop their talents was too long and fraught with
challenges, and that universities were far too removed from real
problems for my taste. So, I thought that completing a doctorate in
administration, planning and social policy would give me the necessary
preparation to achieve my goal: to become Secretary of Education of
Venezuela so that I could help advance the conditions that provided all
children opportunities to develop their talents. As with my earlier plan
to become a lawyer, I did not really know, at the time, the path to
becoming a Secretary of Education.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
12
One of the many transformational opportunities Harvard provided me
came in the form of a fellow student, also from Venezuela, who I met
on my first day in the University. She laughed when I told her my plans
to become Secretary of Education. I, in turn, was puzzled by her desire
to become a teacher, since this is exactly what she was doing in
Venezuela prior to graduate school. As we walked along the Charles
River or down Brattle Street, we engaged in long conversations and
animated discussions about the best way to provide students
opportunities to develop their talents. I would argue that the best path
to large-scale impact was to become Secretary of Education, and she
would argue that it was to teach “one student at a time.” We continue
those conversations to this day, as Eleonora and I got married 31 years
ago.
I quickly put in place a plan B after realizing that Harvard graduates
were not typically invited to become Ministers of Education
immediately upon receiving their diplomas, and that I lacked the
experience, the knowledge, and the social or political capital to become
a Minister. After graduation, I pursued a career advising ministers of
education in a number of countries around the world. I was an
education specialist at the World Bank, thinking that this was not only
a good way to serve my goal of expanding educational opportunity, but
also a good route to eventually become Secretary of Education. So when
the chairman of the department from which I had graduated at Harvard
called me, while I was busily negotiating large national programs to
educate low-income children with the governments of Mexico and
Peru, to suggest that I apply to a faculty search to rebuild the
international education program at Harvard, I was not immediately
receptive to the idea. I did, nevertheless, apply. By the time I received
an offer of appointment, I had convinced myself, with Eleonora’s help,
that the best way for me to expand educational opportunity for all was
by educating others.
I settled into my office in Gutman Library in the first days of January
1998. As this was the winter break, there were few students and faculty
around and I wondered whether I had made a big mistake trading the
activity and buzz of the World Bank for the dark and empty hallways of
Gutman Library in early January.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
13
Students and colleagues eventually arrived, and soon after, I was busy
working with some colleagues designing a new master’s program to
prepare people for leadership careers in the field of international
education. What was then just a concept turned into a wonderful two
decades and a total of almost one thousand graduates of this program
today. Those students have given me many joys and I consider them all
part of my extended family.
During these years, I have also managed to stay active advising
governments and working to expand educational opportunity, albeit in
different ways than I would have had I become Secretary of Education.
In many ways, I have held on to the strong convictions I had as a
teenager taking the bus from my home, up the mountain, past the slums,
into an elite and privileged school. I remain convinced that education
can transform people’s lives and help them decide what life they want
to live, and I know that it is an obligation of a democratic state to
provide opportunities for all to be educated. However, as I have grown
and evolved, so too has my perspective on education.
A silent global revolution which transformed humanity
When I committed myself to working on expanding educational
opportunity, I only knew the three schools I had attended myself. In the
years since, I have visited and studied thousands of schools; worked
with several dozen governments, international development agencies,
foundations and other organizations involved in expanding educational
opportunity; studied many different education programs and met
thousands of educators from many different countries. I have also
learned much from my graduate students, most of whom arrive at
Harvard with some professional experience and many of whom I
remain in touch with after they graduate. These opportunities have
persuaded me that education is a most wonderful human invention that
has caused one of the most remarkable silent revolutions in the shared
history of humanity. This revolution has provided most members of our
species with a shared experience in these wonderful institutions we have
invented to pass on to the young what we consider good: schools.
I now know, as my wife had explained when we first met in 1983, that
indeed the deepest way to educate is one student at a time, and for any
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
14
of us involved in supporting schools, at whatever level we do this, it is
essential that we keep that personal experience of each learner at the
core of what we do. Most of my former students do not go on to
become teachers, but instead work to support what teachers and
students do. Yet I know that they are all working to help educate
children, youth and adults, one student at a time.
What I find most remarkable about this silent revolution which has
transformed humanity is that most of this transformation has taken
place over a relatively short period in human history. Public schools to
educate all children were invented less than two centuries ago, and for
most of the world, universal public education is an aspiration which
resulted from including education as one of the human rights in the
declaration adopted by the United Nations in 1948. That was only
seventy years ago!
It is telling that this global education revolution resulted from a compact
designed to create the conditions for global peace and sustainability.
This is a tall ethical goal for public education, to educate all children so
we can have peace in the world. The institution established to advance
Human Rights, the United Nations, adopted at the General Assembly
of 2015 a compact that builds upon those rights, the Sustainable
Development Goals, which outline an ambitious and hopeful vision of
the conditions necessary to have peace and sustainability in the world.
Education is not only one of those goals, but it is also a means necessary
to achieve all others.
I am now, however, more convinced than ever that this silent revolution
was not meant to happen organically. It was not inevitable but the result
of deliberate choices made by individuals who believed that freedom
and equality would only be advanced by providing all people with
opportunities to develop skills. Those people lead these institutions all
over the world. They do this from multiple roles: some of them teach,
others administer schools, others provide support for schools and for
teachers, others work for governments, some work for the public
sector, and some work for the private sector. Some work in institutions
in their countries of origin, while others work for international
development organizations. This is a remarkable net of organizations
which form the institution of education, and just as remarkable are the
results they have achieved. They provide educational opportunities to
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
15
more than one billion people between the ages of 5 and 17 every year.
3
Those who do this kind of work are the leaders of a global movement
to educate humanity, for the goals of achieving peace and sustainability.
I am immensely grateful that some of the leaders of this Global
Education Movement have been my students.
The Global Education Movement to educate all children and its
fragility
Public education is a remarkable human invention that in a relatively
short period in human history has provided the majority of the younger
members of our species with a shared experience through an institution
invented to pass on the values and knowledge which older generations
consider important, and also to equip them with the skills and
dispositions to break with tradition to improve the world. The following
chart illustrates how the percentage of the world population with some
basic education increased over the last two centuries.
3
There are 263 million children and youth in this age group out of
school, and providing them opportunities to study should be a
priority. However, it is still remarkable that over 1.2 billion are in
school. Sources:
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/age_structure.html and
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-
international-agenda/education-for-all/single-
view/news/263_million_children_and_youth_are_out_of_school_fro
m_primar/
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
16
Most of that significant educational expansion, which took place as the
population grew considerably,
4
benefited from the perception among
progressive policy elites and civic, government, and business leaders
that the various alternative purposes served by education converged and
that there were limited tradeoffs between them. Undergirding such
consensus were the liberal values of freedom and equality. With the
creation of the first democratic republics in the eighteenth century, the
world began to democratize fairly rapidly, spreading these liberal values;
additionally, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and the creation of a new post World War II order further
intensified the widespread acceptance of these core values. The chart
illustrates how the increase in the percentage of the population with
some basic education accelerates after 1960s, arguably the results of
4
In 1950, the world’s population was 2.5 billion, and the percentage of
the population with some basic education was 49%. In 2015, the
world population was 7.4 billion, and the percentage of the population
with some basic education 86%. This means education systems
expanded access even as the number of youth increased significantly.
Sources for world population https://ourworldindata.org/world-
population-growth/ and for percentage of the population with some
schooling https://ourworldindata.org/primary-education-and-
schools/.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
17
successful efforts of UN institutions the previous decade in working
with governments to advance the right to education. Such expansion in
access to education produced a remarkable achievement, the
universalization of basic literacy, as shown in chart 2. Note how the
percentage of the population that is illiterate declines precipitously after
1950.
This perceived convergence of education purposes since December 10,
1948 saw that alternative education goals were complementary and that
there were limited tradeoffs between them. It saw the same skills that
helped people become productive as also helping them to engage as
citizens. It saw advancing human rights as also advancing economic
freedoms. The underlying assumption was that economic, political,
social, and cultural development converged. Policies that fostered
economic development fueled cultural values that were supportive of
economic progress; this in turn fostered more social inclusion and
political development. There were multiple reinforcing loops
connecting the many facets of development. It was also assumed that
globalization would be mutually reinforcing with these processes, and it
was expected that, globally, the world would be moving towards
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
18
convergence in an ongoing cycle towards greater freedom, equality, and
happiness.
For example, as evidence of this perceived convergence of purpose,
during the most significant period of educational expansion in Latin
America in the 1950s and 1960s, UNESCO played a key role advocating
for such expansion in regional meetings that brought together ministers
of education and of finance making the case for universal education as
a human right as well as an economic investment.
5
The theory of human
capital, the notion that economic development could be planned and
that countries could leapfrog stages of economic development by
making strategic investments in human capital and infrastructure,
played as important a role in the expansion of education as the notion
that education was a fundamental human right, foundational to many
other rights and freedoms, and helpful to advance democratic culture.
A more recent example of the perception that various goals were
complementary is that in 2000, when the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development launched the Programme for the
International Student Assessment (PISA), it anchored the assessment
of the basic literacies in language, mathematics and sciences as those
levels necessary to participate in knowledge economies and democratic
societies. For instance, the definition of literacy that the PISA studies
are aligned to is: “Reading literacy is understanding, using, and reflecting
on written texts, in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s
knowledge and potential, and to participate in society.”
6
The trajectory of the global educational expansion was certainly not
linear; events such as economic circumstances and wars influenced the
priority that public education could receive. In addition, interruptions
and discontinuities took place as a result of conflict over education
5
Reimers, F. Deuda Extena y Financiamiento de la Educacion. Su Impacto en
Latinoamerica. Santiago, UNESCO-OREALC. 1990.
6
OECD Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills. A New Framework for
Assessment. Paris, 1999, page 19.
https://www.oecd.org/edu/school/programmeforinternationalstuden
tassessmentpisa/33693997.pdf.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
19
goals, and of conflicting views on the priority of education relative to
other societal investments. I have elsewhere discussed how the history
of public education in Latin America can be construed as the history of
the competition between two political projects, a conservative project
that saw social relations between groups as fixed and a liberal project
interested in advancing the freedoms and opportunities of subdominant
groups.
7
Such discontinuities notwithstanding, the overarching picture remains
that the expansion of public education has, over the last seven decades,
benefited from consensus on the benefits of education to serve many
different goals, assuming limited tradeoffs between them. The political
philosophy of Liberalism was the foundation of such consensus.
As liberalism, which has provided the foundation for much of the work
of governments and of the global institutions created after World War
II, is increasingly challenged by populist and nationalist movements, it
is necessary to reexamine the question of what it means to educate
citizens in our times.
Historical roots of the cosmopolitan purposes of public education
The idea that all persons should be educated is relatively recent. It is
primarily a product of the Enlightenment and of liberal political
thought. As part of the ideology of liberalism, public education’s goals
were to promote freedom and equality and to educate citizens for a
liberal political order.
The Enlightenment was a cosmopolitan project, founded on the basic
idea that all people had the same rights. The promotion of the
institutions to advance such equality of rights was one that engaged
people across borders. In this sense, the idea of fraternity included in
the motto of the French revolution (Liberté, égalité et fraternité, which
translates as Freedom, equality and solidarity) referred not only to
solidarity among fellow citizens within the same national jurisdiction,
7
Reimers, F. Social Progress in Latin America. Victor Bulmer-Thomas
and John Coatsworth (Eds.) Cambridge Economic History of Latin
America. Vol II. Pp. 427-480. Cambridge University Press. 2006.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
20
but to solidarity across national borders to advance freedom and
equality. The expansion of three institutions which resulted from the
Enlightenment, democracy, the public school and the modern research
university, benefited from global cooperation and from a fundamental
understanding that such transnational solidarity was essential to
advancing a global project to expand freedom and equality.
The establishment of the first independent and democratic republics
benefitted from such solidarity across nations. It was for this reason, for
instance, that Francisco de Miranda, born in Caracas and one of the
intellectual architects of the independence movement in South America,
served in the revolutionary wars of the United States, France, and South
America. Similarly, Alexander Hamilton, born in Charlestown on the
island of Nevis, would join the independence movement of the United
States and would go on to be one of the founding fathers of the
American democratic experiment. It was that same commitment to a
global project of advancement of liberal values that drove Frenchman
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, best known as the
Marquis de Lafayette, to serve in the American War of Independence
as well as in the French Revolution.
Similarly, the establishment of public education, understood by the
founders of the first democratic republics to be essential to the well-
functioning of democracy, benefited from global cooperation. For
example, on a visit to seek assistance from the British, Simon Bolivar
(one of the leaders of Independence in South America) was introduced
by Francisco de Miranda, who lived in London at the time, to Joseph
Lancaster, the creator of the monitorial system of instruction, which
allowed extending education to low-income students. Bolivar would
eventually persuade Lancaster to move to Caracas and establish the first
teacher training institution. Similarly, Venezuelan-born Andres Bello,
serving as the first rector of the University of Chile, created a contest
inviting faculty to design approaches to educating citizens in the newly
independent republic. Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a
faculty member at the University of Chile, submitted and won the
contest with his thesis “Popular Education,” an approach that drew on
his conversations with Horace and Mary Peabody Mann, who led the
movement for public education in Massachusetts.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
21
Scientific research and the modern research university, the third
institution advanced by the Enlightenment, are also at heart
cosmopolitan enterprises. When some of the signatories of the United
States Declaration of Independence chartered the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 1780, the oldest scientific academy in the United
States, they tasked it not only with the promotion of scientific inquiry
to advance the public good, but with the promotion of exchanges
among scientists, no matter their country of residency. The same year,
John Adams wrote the Massachusetts constitution, whose first article
speaks eloquently about the public purposes of our universities — at
the beginning about who needed to be educated and why, and at the
end about virtues they needed to learn. Three decades later, the creation
of the University of Berlin sparked a veritable global movement of
renewal of higher education institutions around the world along similar
lines as Adams had imagined for the American Academy and for our
public universities, away from institutions devoted to the transmission
of religious dogma, into institutions committed to the advancement of
scientific research, the promotion of critical thinking, and the education
of the public. This cosmopolitan aspiration of the Enlightenment is
eloquently captured in this quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
“He who speaks only one language sees the world with only one eye.”
The institutions which were built on ideas from the Enlightenment were
imperfect, as there were inherent contradictions in that they “limited”
the ideals/ideas of freedom, equality and brotherhood (and even
citizenship rights) to certain groups, excluding women and some racial
groups, while “allowing” slavery, exploitation, colonialism/
domination, and sexism to be the norm in these “enlightened” societies
that affirmed that “all men are created equal… and endowed with
certain inalienable rights.” Yet, the liberal values that were foundational
to the creation of these institutions provided the basis to over time
untangle and correct these contradictions, thus making possible the
progress we have made globally in the advancement of universal human
rights. In this sense, the institutions of democracy are always a work in
progress, advancing towards the achievement of the aspirations of
freedom and equality, and the institutions of public education and of
the modern university are also a work in progress, advancing as a result
of continuous challenges to live up to their promise to advance freedom
and equality. It is as a result of those challenges that democracy
progresses towards recognizing the rights of groups previously denied
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
22
those rights, such as women or racial minorities, and that public schools
and universities also progress, expanding access to students from all
walks of life and backgrounds.
It was thus a result of the cosmopolitan aspirations of those who led
the establishment of the institutions of democracy, public education and
modern universities, that solidarity and cooperation across national
borders fueled their global expansion. Created to advance the values of
liberty, equality and solidarity, the development of these institutions
benefited from a form of solidarity that transcended national
boundaries, from global solidarity or global citizenship.
The Global Expansion in public education, for example, benefited from
the consolidation of the new independent and democratic nation states,
from the expansion of liberalism in the 1800s, and again after World
War II as a result of the creation of a global architecture to promote the
liberal ideas of freedom and equality around the world.
Under liberalism, it was assumed that public education could serve
democratic political and economic goals with limited tradeoffs between
them. Additional goals such as advancing human rights and
modernization were also seen as convergent with political and
economic goals. For this reason, most governments advancing
education as part of liberalism saw limited tradeoffs between the goals
of education, and the same was true of the international organizations
created to advance global security after World War II.
The challenges to liberalism from communism and fascism presented
alternative goals for public education, questioning the notion that
individuals could be free to choose which education to pursue, and
emphasizing political and economic goals, as well as downplaying
human rights and modernization. Those challenges helped those who
valued freedom and equality to think with greater moral clarity about
the need to align education institutions to the institutions of democracy.
Harvard president James Bryan Conant, for example, understood that
admitting only white Protestant males from privileged backgrounds to
study at Harvard was more aligned with the ideology of racial superiority
advanced by Hitler than with the values on which the American
democratic experiment was founded. As a result of this understanding,
he initiated reforms designed to create a more inclusive admissions
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
23
process at Harvard. He opened admission to students from different
social backgrounds and created financial aid programs; later he extended
similar reforms for colleges across the country.
The construction of the post-war order, which began with the
establishment of the United Nations and the approval of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, brought into focus the moral purpose of
educating all persons. Article 26 of the Declaration of Human Rights
emphasizes that the point of educating all is to educate each in the rights
of every person and in the institutions which have been created to
advance them. The declaration is, therefore, a seminal document in the
advancement of global citizenship, and Article 26 calls for education for
global citizenship, a cause that UN institutions have advanced
episodically throughout their history.
The challenges to aligning education systems with a
cosmopolitan vision of freedom and equality
The tensions between the Soviet block and the liberal world during the
Cold War, however, impeded the development of a global consensus
with respect to advancing a global citizenship agenda. This is perhaps
the reason why the tacit operational education consensus of many of
the international development institutions created after World War II
evolved into getting all children in schools rather than focusing more
intentionally on what they should learn in school, or how their learning
should align with a liberal vision of freedom and equality, as had been
intended in the UN Charter. Consensus on those topics was as difficult
to reach in international institutions as it was in societies in which there
is much political contestation. This is, perhaps, the reason the PISA
studies so far have focused on domains such as literacy, mathematics
and science, and not on domains like civics or global citizenship; it is
perhaps the reason multilateral and bilateral banks have seldom
addressed questions of curriculum content and seldom funded
education operations designed to promote democratization, and the
reason organizations like UNESCO have found it difficult to advance
human rights education around the world, even though they were
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
24
created to do this.
8
It should be noted that the OECD has been working
for the last several years to add a dimension of global competence to
the PISA assessments, but reaching consensus among the governments
participating in these discussions on the merits and approaches to doing
this has proved challenging. It remains to be seen whether the
dimensions of global competency, which will be eventually incorporated
into the assessment, will include civic dimensions or merely dimensions
relevant for economic competitiveness. In spite of these challenges, the
United Nations institutions have made efforts to advance global
citizenship, most recently as part of the Sustainable Development Goals
agenda, which for the first time in 2015 included a focus on educating
for global citizenship.
Given the difficulties in reaching explicit consensus on the value of
aligning education goals with a liberal cosmopolitan vision of freedom
and equality, many nations as well as international organizations focused
instead on particular competencies as goals for the public education
system, without attempting an integrated view of how those
competencies would align with a democratic vision advancing the values
of freedom and equality. Speaking about “skills for a knowledge
economy” was less contentious, in international fora, than speaking
about “skills for a democratic society.”
It is arguably for this reason that the curriculum frameworks in most
countries focus on the basic literacies of language, mathematics and
science, but to a significantly lesser extent on civics. Increasingly,
curriculum frameworks are expanding to include other competencies,
not only to other cognitive domains, but also to social and emotional
domains.
9
Governments and educators now are also interested in
character, self-regulation, self-awareness, grit, tolerance and leadership.
8
For example, UNESCO has conducted studies of the way in which
textbooks can foster human rights and tolerance among people along
various dimensions of diversity, but has been unable to focus
attention, at the ministerial meetings they convene every two years, for
example, on specific cases where governments have used textbooks to
develop animus against people from other nations or cases where
intolerant groups have influenced the history curriculum.
9
Reimers, F. and Chung, C. (Eds) Teaching and Learning for the Twenty
First Century. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press. 2016.
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
25
But, for the most part, those interests are not framed as part of a vision
of how the integration of those capacities will enable people to
individually and collectively advance social or economic goals. This is a
difficult conversation to have in settings where there is no consensus
about which economic strategy to pursue to integrate the country in a
global economy, a conversation which will become more difficult as the
values of liberalism are increasingly contested.
In spite of the challenges to developing clear and coherent visions for
the purposes of public education, however, the dominance of liberalism
as the organizing principle of the post war order, particularly given the
support of countries with large economies also committed to liberalism,
fueled a set of education purposes more or less aligned with the ideals
of freedom and equality, even if those were not spelled out explicitly.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
acceleration of globalization in the last two decades made these
education aims of liberalism the dominant tacit consensus in most of
the world. As explained earlier, the undergirding rationale of such
consensus was that there were limited tradeoffs between alternative
education purposes: that the same skills that helped people become
productive also helped them engage as citizens, and that advancing
human rights was also advancing freedoms.
The challenges to the tacit liberal values that undergird global
educational expansion
Such tacit consensus on the reason why nations advance public
education and cooperate with others in this enterprise is increasingly
challenged by an emerging populist ideology.
Populism posits that ordinary people are exploited by elites and
challenges the notion of representative democracy with direct action by
the masses. Since direct action by large numbers is impractical, too often
populism results in autocratic rule by a leader, communicating directly
with the masses, unobstructed by either intermediary institutions or the
checks and balances of democratic government. Some recent populist
leaders include Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Pim Fortuyn in the
Netherlands, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia,
Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and more recently Narendra Modi in India,
Andrzej Duda in Poland, and Donald Trump in the United States.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
26
Historically populism has at times led to the breakdown of democracy
and to fascism, characterized by a complete power grab based on
extreme nationalism and racial superiority ideologies, as illustrated by
the breakdown of the Weimar republic in Germany and the rise of
Hitler to power in the 1930s, or the creation of the one party
dictatorship by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s. More recently,
other populist leaders have used democratic structures to bring about
autocratic regimes, as is the case with Vladimir Putin in Russia, Robert
Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Recep Erdogan in Turkey or Hugo Chavez and
his appointed successor Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
Modern populists exploit the following ideas. The first is that
globalization and liberal policies do not benefit all, and that there are
important groups of the population who are left behind without hope
of seeing their conditions improve. Populists attribute this to elites who
are not accountable to those groups, and to a model of development
that fails to envision a role for the groups who are left behind. Populists
also exploit cultural divides and deep differences in values and
worldviews among the population. In India, since the arrival of Mr.
Modi to the office of prime minister, intolerance has become virulent
and mobs now attack and kill Muslims over their religious and cultural
practices, such as eating beef. These trends in India are a real threat to
religious minorities, especially as the country does not seem to have a
viable opposition party to provide an alternative view and counter the
possible rise of fascism and Hindutva ideologies.
In the recent presidential election in the United States, the populist base
of President Trump draws on older Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideas
to challenge the political establishment which advances the progressive
views of the Hamiltonians and Wilsonians which have dominated since
World War II. The Hamiltonians advance the idea of the United States
playing a leadership role in creating a global liberal order to contain the
Soviet Union and advance US interests. The Wilsonians also advance a
global liberal order in terms of values that would reduce global conflict
and violence. They promote human rights, democratic governance and
the rule of law. The Jeffersonians, on the other hand, believe that
minimizing the global role of the United States would reduce costs and
risks. Jacksonian populist nationalists, in contrast, focus on both
restoring the dignity of American citizens who felt “left behind” and
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
27
delinking from cosmopolitan enlightenment ideals and the global liberal
order.
10
These populist views are a challenge to the ideas of a universal project
to advance freedom, equality, and human rights. They are a challenge to
the project of globalization, they may be a challenge to the idea of
representative democracy, and they have implications for public
education and for the global project of advancing education for all.
The educational implications of populism
It is consistent with populist views to advocate more power to local
groups to define the goals of education, and fewer roles for government
and for inter-governmental institutions. Replacing global and national
politics with local politics, of course, does not mean greater consensus.
Instead, it may mean more conflict, perhaps with fewer rules of
arbitration. The divisions between cosmopolitans and populists exist in
local communities. One question is how will these differences be
resolved? Will the rule of law and expertise continue to play a role? We
should expect less trust in public education institutions, resulting from
less trust in governments, in experts and in elites. It is also possible that
we will witness a renewed emphasis on identity politics and culture wars
in education.
There are four interrelated risks we can expect to emerge from these challenges to the
liberal values of freedom and equality as organizing principles of public education.
The first is a risk to the idea of human rights, which may undermine
support for public education and for global citizenship education. If
nationalism is the new organizing force, the notion of in-group and out-
group is defined by citizenship and not by membership in humanity, a
challenge to the cosmopolitan foundation of the liberal values of the
Enlightenment. Since one of the consequences of globalization has
been migration, non-citizens will be the first target for exclusion. This
may undermine consensus on the importance of public education.
10
Walter Russell Mead “The Jacksonian Revolt. American Populism
and the Liberal Order” Foreign Affairs. March/April 2017.
One Student at a Time. Leading the Global Education Movement
28
If cultural wars define the politics of education, we should expect to see
an increase in the ongoing battles over the rights of cultural and ethnic
minorities, like the right to see them represented in the curriculum or
the right to access various levels of education. In the United States, for
example, there are individuals and groups lobbying schools for changes
in the curriculum, which reduce the emphasis on global topics and
content. Conservative groups have long engaged in battles over the
curriculum and textbooks in schools. These battles have intensified
since the last presidential campaign as reported to me by a number of
teachers and school leaders working in global citizenship education
efforts. In New Jersey, for example, the director of English and social
studies of the Rumson Fair-Haven regional high school was recently
challenged in a petition organized by a parent over the inclusion of two
books in the history curriculum (Ariel Dorfman's Death and the
Maiden and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal), and for globally-oriented texts
such as Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah.
11
The efforts to ban
books such as these from the curriculum continues by advocates who
self-identify as having been mentored by national advocates of similar
efforts. One example is Dr. Sandra Stotsky, one of the expert witnesses
who testified in the court case involving the Mexican American Studies
Program in the Tucson Unified School District; Dr. Stotsky’s position
has been promoted by the Breitbart's website.
12
An expression of the
challenges to the rights of minority groups to access education, at the
time of this writing the civil rights division of the US Department of
Justice was preparing to investigate and sue universities over affirmative
action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white
applicants.
13
11
Jack Shea, personal communication, May 2017.
12
This is a far right news website which the New York Times has
characterized as disseminating news that are ideologically driven,
racist, misogynist and xenophobic
13
Charlie Savage, Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in
College Admissions. The New York Times. August 1, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/us/politics/trump-
affirmative-action-universities.html
Leading the expansion of relevant educational opportunities around the world
29
A second risk concerns our ability to address global challenges. The
prospects for international collaboration in addressing shared global
challenges diminish as the world moves towards national populism, and
the goals of education move away from preparing students to
understand global interconnectedness and globalization. Climate
change, for instance, can only be addressed if leaders and people of
different nations collaborate in addressing it. Without the capacity to
collaborate with people from different cultures the prospects that we
will be able to effectively address challenges like this diminish
considerably.
A third risk is a breakdown of the institutions that were created to
protect freedom, democracy, the rule of law, public education, and basic
human rights. This is the risk that populism might evolve into fascism.
There are early warnings of this risk in schools. The sharp increase in
intolerance in America has been clearly expressed in and around schools
and universities, in the form of more explicit expression of anti-
Semitism, white supremacy, Islamophobia and hatred towards people
of color and immigrants.
14
A fourth risk follows from the previous ones and it is that lack of trust
in institutions, elites and governments, will make the challenge of
resolving these conflicts greater.
Can the institutions created to advance a liberal world order save
it?
Individuals or institutions interested in a global liberal order should
consider a new focus on education for democratic citizenship, including
global citizenship. This means supporting educators so that schools can
advance human rights, educate about shared global challenges, educate
for engaged citizenship, focus on dispositions and values as much as
skills and attend to the conditions that make it possible for schools to
14
Southern Poverty Law Center. After Election Day. The Trump
Effect. The Impact of the 2016 Presidential Election on Our Nation’s
Schools. 2016. See also Hate Map. https://www.splcenter.org/hate-
map Accessed May 5, 2017.
