Gita Steiner-KhamsiView profile
Professor
Gita Steiner-Khamsi is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she chairs the Department of International and Transcultural Studies. She also holds a UNESCO Chair in Comparative Education Policy at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her career spans over three decades with significant contributions to understanding how educational policies travel across national borders and are adapted in local contexts. Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Zürich (1983) and an honorary doctoral degree from Mongolian State University of Education (2004). Prior to joining Columbia, she worked for ten years on multicultural and anti-racist education policies at the Ministry of Education in Zurich, Switzerland. Steiner-Khamsi's research focuses on policy borrowing and lending, globalization studies, comparative policy analysis, school reform, and teacher policy. She has pioneered system-theoretical approaches to understanding externalization, reception, and translation of educational policies across borders. Her work examines how international organizations govern education in the absence of coercive measures and how governments respond to global norm-setting. Her publication record shows consistent scholarly output with increasing focus on knowledge brokerage as a global governance tool, soft governance through international comparison, and transnational accreditation of public schools. Her most recent book (2025) explores the seven temporalities of global school reform, demonstrating her continued evolution in examining the time dimensions of policy transfer. William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education UNESCO Chair in Comparative Education Policy Dr. h.c. from Mongolian State University of Education Steiner-Khamsi has supervised over 60 doctoral students (PhDs and EdDs) and has led significant international projects including the USAID Teacher Education Project in Pakistan, which she describes as giving "ownership to Pakistanis" rather than having donors dictate implementation. Her research has been supported by various international organizations including UNICEF, where she investigated teacher shortages in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She maintains active research projects examining public-private partnerships in education, global governance mechanisms, and transnational accreditation systems, continuing to shape the field of comparative education policy through both theoretical contributions and practical applications in diverse international contexts.












