Two of the main obstacles for drawing educational comparisons consist in determining what are considered "high quality" initiatives, and finding a common tool that can adapt to differences in both structure and content, as well as to the cultural and demographic characteristics of the population it wishes to serve. This paper focuses on addressing such obstacles by inquiring whether an instrument such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) can be used to compare the early childhood development initiatives in countries like Chile and Bangladesh. Using Pena's (2007) model that considers linguistic, functional, cultural and metric equivalence, we examine the implementation of the ECERS in these two settings, and identify the factors of significance in the instrument's successful adaption to a different context.