This RISE Working Paper is based on a multi-year engagement of joint research between the Harvard School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School of Government, authored by Mark Moore, member of the RISE ILT. It offers ways of examining conditions for systemic reform by developing concepts that can help in analysing national educational systems and generating ideas about how the scale and quality of such efforts might best be expanded.

In this paper, Moore develops a scheme for describing a “national educational system”, outlining the advantages of sustaining a broad view of systems, despite their complexity. Looking broadly across a national society, he defines and measures the aggregate “demand” for education, looking at the wants, needs, rights and obligations to educational services and finding that most national systems are mixed, such as between private and public sectors. He also considers the importance of national government in shaping and improving the performance of the national educational system, naming and identifying the tools that can be used to shape social production systems and outcomes.

Moore finds that further study into concepts of systems is needed, with knowledge about how the structure, conduct and performance of a national education system can be affected by tools of governance, remaining insufficient. His paper concludes that the main challenge facing national governments regarding educational policy is in figuring out how to use these tools to build a national educational system that can learn by doing, and by talking about what is valuable that is being produced.