Q&A: Fernando Reimers, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D.’88

Ask anyone at the Ed School this question, “How have our students, and HGSE overall, made an impact on the field of education around the world?” and unanimously, everyone would say to contact one certain faculty member: Professor Fernando Reimers. For more than 25 years, Reimers, a transplant from Venezuela who first came to Harvard as a student himself, directed the school’s former International Education Policy (IEP) Program and now serves as faculty chair of the Global, International, and Comparative Education concentration. He’s advised dozens of doctoral students writing dissertations ranging from a study of Syrian refugees to the evaluation of private schools for the poor in Kenya. He’s published more than 50 books about global education, and he regularly hosts international visitors when they come to the school. When it comes to listing the countries and international development agencies he’s advised over the years, it’s probably easier to list the ones he hasn’t worked with. 

This past spring, Reimers spoke to Ed. about how he became the school’s international guru, how our students and alums are having an impact around the world, and the common thread that connects those who work in the field globally. 

How did you end up as the director of IEP? 
I graduated in 1988 from HGSE, and I immediately got hired by the Harvard Institute for International Development. I worked with them for about a decade. Towards the end of my tenure, I took a leave of absence to go to the World Bank. When I came back in 1997, then-Dean Jerry Murphy tells me, “Fernando, we realize there is a big opportunity to do something international.” The Ed School had an international program, but it was more like a concentration. I said, why don’t you build a full program? And that’s when we built the International Education Policy Program [a precursor to today’s Global, International, and Comparative Education concentration]. And the way we went about building that program is we basically interviewed a lot of people who work in international development agencies, and we said, what kind of skills should someone who knows about education have? What would be valuable to you in your work in the field?

Based on that, what did you think graduates would end up doing out in the world?  
Initially I thought all of our alums were going to go and work in ministries of education and help them make good planning and policy decisions. And undoubtedly some of them do that. A number of graduates have been deputy ministers and ministers of states or provinces. Others work for international development agencies like UNESCO, UNICEF, the UN High Commission for Refugees, USAID, and The World Bank. But it turns out they are doing so many different things, and it’s all education. I had not imagined that some of them were going to create universities. Others built K–12 schools. I have former students who are now involved in running chains of schools around the world. That’s not something I had imagined they were going to do, but the world has changed relative to 1998. 

Can you give us some specific examples of the different ways alums are working in the field?  
There are so many. I had a former student who worked in international development upon graduation in Pakistan, and then wanted to teach. She taught history for six years at a school in the United States before returning to work in international development with RTI International, a nonprofit research institute. 

Another former student came to us from Brazil with little direct experience in education. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do but knew she didn’t want to work in government. I connected her with a donor at a university in Brazil. She managed to get the donor to fund her for three months to travel around the country and find out what she could do that would have an impact. She concluded that for low-income Brazilians, learning to speak English was very important. In Brazil, if you can speak English, you have chances you wouldn’t otherwise have. And so she created a company and hired 30 people, half were computer programmers and half knew something about curriculum. The company delivered courses in English at a cost of $20 a month. She was wildly successful. At one point, she was training 50,000 students a month. Pearson eventually bought her company, and she became their head of innovation. 

Another worked in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, teaching in an international school. She came to the Ed School and developed a real passion for climate. She realized teachers need help figuring out how to teach kids about climate change, and so she started her own company. It’s called Subject to Climate. 

Is there a common thread for our international students or for alums who work globally?  
The one thing they all have in common is this commitment to using education as an avenue of social mobility, to using education to help people who can really benefit from it, and sometimes using education to help people see things they wouldn’t see otherwise