The educational systems in most of the world's industrial countries have gone through great changes during the past few decades. These reforms have at the system level had a dramatic impact on operations within the schools. Up until the 1980's, the nation-state created the foundations for the development of the welfare system, but since then global forces have become increasingly influential upon development. Most OECD countries, with the possible exception of Japan, have carried out similar restructurings of their respective educational systems. Centralistic systems have been decentralized in countries such as Finland, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, whereas countries employing more federative, decentralized systems - Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA - have centralized their curricula and assessment systems. Despite the fact that decentralizing and centralizing forces pull in diametrically opposed directions, it is interesting to note that the restructuring efforts have yielded similar results, particularly with regard to the quality assessments that have been developed in different countries.The aim of this paper is to problematize, with a focus on the tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces, the changes taken place in recent decades regarding school quality assessments. The analysis is done in order to facilitate discussion about the consequences that various approaches to educational policies can have on classroom processes. The material used in the empirical study (carried out in Sweden) consists of regulations and policy documents, quality assessment reports from one municipality, and a selection of state inspection reports. Although the study is limited to the Swedish context, the concluding discussion is cast in somewhat general terms based on the theoretical framework employed here.The starting point of this theoretical framework is critical theory, in particular, the theory of communication, discourse and deliberation that is mainly associated with Jürgen Habermas. From this perspective, decentralization and centralization can be seen as poles within the framework of a whole. The tension that exists between these two poles will be discussed here in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy. Effectiveness is related to control, money, power, and market adjustment, whereas legitimacy is related to factors such as participation, meaning-making, learning and democracy. Our starting point is that when effectiveness is emphasized to the point that focus on controls increases to a certain critical level, then legitimacy demands increase, and vice versa. For example, in Sweden today we have observed that the decentralization of the 1990s, which made greater demands on participation with regard to both the teaching process and planning at the local level, has now reverted to a greater emphasis on centralization. State controls are noticeable in the state inspections, and in that the municipality's quality-related efforts are increasingly focused on national rather than local objectives. However, closer examination reveals that decentralization does not necessarily imply increased participation, and that centralization, in turn, does not necessarily imply increased control. The relationship between effectiveness and legitimacy is more complex than this. In some cases, the opposite relationship can be observed.