A comparative case study of the implementation of education reforms in Finland and Singapore

Abstract

International organizations have in the past promoted a decentralized, loosely coupled approach to education reform, emulating high-performing school systems such as that in Finland (Mourshed et al., 2010).The promulgation of a supposed universal model for successful education reform has drawn criticism from researchers who give the example of Singapore’s high-performing system that, in contrast, employs a tightly coupled and controlled approach to reform (Dimmock and Tan, 2016).This seeming contradiction raises the question of whether a universal model for implementing education reform and developing school systems on a path towards high performance exists. This dissertation aims to compare the implementation of education reforms in Finland and Singapore to better understand the nuances of reform in contrasting settings. Based on an extended literature review of reforms in both countries, the dissertation analyzes and compares how control was distributed to actors at various levels of the system, how stakeholders made sense of the reforms, and with what degree of fidelity the reforms were implemented .It finds that the Finnish and Singaporean school systems differed substantially in their approaches to implementing reform, both in terms of the distribution of control and the sense-making processes in which stakeholders engaged. In both school systems, consistent and faithful implementation was largely absent. This dissertation concludes that the success of specific reform approaches is inextricably linked to the context of each school system, highlighting the limits of universal recommendations for successful education reform.