Debates on educational standards such as performance measures, professional profiles and competency lists for teaching staff often take the form of an either-or discussion (e.g. Fendler, 2009; Ladwig & Gore, 2009; Page, 2016; Stone-Johnson, 2014; Storey, 2007). Either they are seen as an instrument to ensure “that competent people want to work as teachers, that their teaching is of high quality, and that all students have access to high quality teaching” (OECD, 2005: 1-2); or they are regarded as an intrusive expression of the ambition to regulate and control teaching and education at large (e.g. Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Ball, 2003). Whereas the first perspective assumes a linear relation between raising standards, improving quality and improving the standing and status of the teaching profession (OECD, 2005; European Commission, 2013), the second criticizes the idea of capturing the complex and always undefined practices of teaching into performance measures, lists of competencies or learning outcomes, thereby pointing to side-effects such as de-professionalization, fragmentation and reductionism (Ball, 2003; Biesta, 2007; Korthagen, 2004; Larsen, 2010; Sachs, 2003; Simons & Kelchtermans, 2008).

Conceiving standards through a binary lens, though, fails to capture the specific and unintended consequences of different sorts of standards for different groups of actors in distinct social settings (Ceulemans, Simons & Struyf, 2012; Fendler, 2009; Page, 2016; Sachs, 2003; Stone-Johnson, 2014; Storey, 2007). While notions like ‘parallel professionalism’ (Stone-Johnson, 2014) and ‘new professionalism’ (Storey, 2007) have been introduced to point to the different ways educational standards are experienced by teachers from different generations, various authors highlight the importance of research perspectives that allow to see the tensions and contradictions that are enacted when standards and their concomitant accountability measures come to play a role in what people say and do in education (e.g. Campozano Aviles & Simons, 2013; Ladwig & Gore, 2009; Page, 2016; Penninckx, Vanhoof, De Maeyer & Van Petegem, 2016; Simons, Kelchtermans, Leysen & Vandenbroek, 2016).

In this article, we try to move beyond this dilemma by shifting the focus away from what standards are (the content) or where they are for (the goal or intentions) and replace it by the detailed study of what standards do in a particular setting. Building on a case-study of the Flemish teacher career profile ‘in action’ (Latour, 1987), we present six mechanisms of standardizing work. First: for standards to have an effect, they need a specific type of user (otherwise they’re just a piece of paper no one cares for). Second: the more a standard allows for a versatile use, the more powerful its effect. Third: once people identify with a standard in what they say and do, its effect tends to go unnoticed, which, fourthly, often implies a shift in control between the standard and its user(s). Fifth: the capacity to control lies within (those working with) the standard, not in the hands of those who would be ‘behind’ the standard. Sixth, and building on the former: what a standard does depends on what and who it relates to. If we want to take hold of standards and what they do in education, therefore, we have to know more about how exactly they come to work. Opening the black box of educational standards, we argue, makes it possible to discuss, time and again, which role(s) standards (are to) play in education, whether these standards do what those working with the standard – teachers, school principals, teacher educators, educational researchers, experts and policy makers alike – expect them to do, and if not, how their working conditions need to be altered.

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