The presentation revisits and counterpoints three claims on quality in education that are dominant in the political and scientific debates. 1) Quality is globally the main goal of education, 2) Test-based Accountability (TBA) provides a sound way of steering education, and 3) Literature on governance at a distance provides a sound framework to understand TBA. These three claims are critically examined with the help of the empirical research from a project analysing the politics of quality in Brazil, China, and Russia. Documentary and interview material were collected from international organisations, and national, subnational, and municipal level actors by interviewing 200 politicians, officials, teachers, experts, and other stakeholders. The project used and tested a new analytical framework of Comparative Analytics of Dynamics in Education Politics, with the aim to understand the changing and fluid nature of politics and the room of action for different actors in the field. The main findings indicate that three types of dynamics can be discerned in Brazil, China, and Russia, which question the two first claims noted above: 1) Quality assurance and evaluation (QAE), despite initially conceived as a tool to achieve quality in education, has become a goal of education governance in itself. While quality of education remains undefined and contested, QAE becomes the concrete, must-do in education, and remains uncontested. This dynamic is called “shared and self-reinforcing goal-setting”. 2) The tools for TBA do not produce quality as such, but rather work as a means of controlling the provision of education. In addition, TBA is an attempt to tease out desired aspects from the education system, which are not always connected with education. However, implementation itself is multifaceted and frequently taking place in a transnational context. The dynamic follows the logic of “authorising but diverted governance”. 3) Means to control quality both destabilises and reorganises actor roles. Opening of the TBA toolbox can lead to destabilisation of the status quo in the new space available for politicking in a way of “destabilising and reorganised role-setting” dynamic. The three dynamics listed here also question the theoretical emphasis in the governance-at-a-distance literature, which has been predominantly a phenomenon of the Global North, with its theory having its roots in France and the UK. None of the yielded results support the idea that the governance-at-a-distance theory is a good description of the rooms of action that were observed in Brazil, China, and Russia.

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