In much the same way that Lee Kuan Yew and his colleagues had to centralize power to manage the development process,The Ministry of Education (MOE), inheriting a divided school symtem, had to seek centralization to assert control to ensure policy implementation.This centralization enabled the government to impose order on the school system and lay the foundations of an effective, well-resourced national school system, which was achieved by the late-1980s. The key to effective schools was leadership. The physical and cultural construction of the new government schools went hand in hand. Key correlates of effectiveness were put in place during this period. By the mid-1980s many of the reforms that would only be attempted in developed countries later in the decade were already in place in Singapore (Sharpe & Gopinathan, 1996). We would argue that the bulk of this transformation was a top-down process, which had major implications for the role of the principal as primarily implementing given policies.