Educators and politicians in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea expound the necessity for their East Asian school systems to become more like those in the West. They complain that there is too much rote learning, uniformity and standardisation and too little emphasis on creativity, diversity and problem-solving. In addition, competition is fierce for scarce places in elite schools and universities, leading to unfulfilled ambitions and wastage of talent among the high proportions of young people failing to gain entry. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the USA and Britain
look in the reverse direction to these same East Asian countries and wonder what they can learn from the superior academic results of East Asian students on International Achievement Tests in mathematics and science (Atkin & Black 1997).
This relatively new phenomenon, a reciprocal interest of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in each other’s school systems, characterised much of the 1990s. Other factors, besides those mentioned, fuelled the tendency to look beyond national boundaries for answers to educational problems. While many developing countries have for some time looked to Europe and North America for their policy models, what was particularly new about the 1990s was the interest taken by the developed countries, such as the USA and UK, in the school systems of East and South-East Asia (Dimmock 2000).
In this article, we affirm that internationalism as an educational phenomenon is desirable, especially in the new millennium of global trade, multi-cultural societies, the Internet and air travel. However, equally, in an era when many are prone to draw superficial comparisons between policies and practices adopted in different coun- tries, we argue the need for caution. In particular, such comparisons, we claim, can be fatuous and misleading without thorough understanding of the contexts, histories and cultures within which they have developed. Our main purposes in this article are thus twofold. First, to argue the need to develop a comparative and international branch of educational leadership and management. Second, to propose a compara- tive model of educational leadership and management based on cultural and cross-cultural analysis. The article begins with the justification for developing an international and comparative branch of the field. It then goes on to explain the appropriateness of culture as a core concept in developing comparative educational management. A model is then proposed as a useful conceptual framework for drawing valid international comparisons in school leadership and management. Finally, we allude to some challenges and limitations of the approach.