In Austria, a policy of performance standards, comparative performance testing and data feedback has been introduced as major incarnation of new evidence-based governance regimes in order to promote the quality of their education systems. However, these innovations depend on the willingness and competence of actors on various levels of the school system to make them work ultimately on classroom and school level. The paper will present the results of two projects, both tracing the implementation of educational standards and the use of the performance test results in longitudinal, qualitative design (3 year study of secondary schools in project 1; 1,5 year study of primary schools in project 2). The paper will comparatively discuss the results of these projects. Implications for the practical implementation of new governance instruments as well as for the conceptualization of school-level processes of making use of evidence-based instruments based on the model by Ehren et al.(2013) will be presented.

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