Modern education is defined by a multitude of programs, technologies, data, and agents each claiming to make education a steppingstone and a catapult for a better, more effective, more competitive, richer, and/or more sustainable society. A core component of the contemporary governance regime is the construction of comparability via statistics and indicators. As argued by several authors, comparative data, numbers and statistics stand central in the modes of governance in global education today (Grek, 2009; Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003; Sellar & Lingard, 2013). The main argument is that the selected variables, underlying assumptions, concepts, categories, logarithms and modes of counting, constituting the backbone of seemingly objective education data, form a governing complex with the power of setting standards for what education is in general and what good education is in particular. Historically, the forming of this governing complex has been the subject of both collaboration and struggles between various agents. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the negotiations, resistances, inertias and modifications in evidence in the UNESCO-OECD-World Bank relations in terms of education statistics. The chapter covers some five decades going back to the early 1960s when the formation of the OECD first challenged the position of UNESCO in education (Elfert & Ydesen 2020). The paper features three analytical layers: The geopolitical context, the shifting purposes of education statistics, and organizational changes and rivalries. The paper draws on primary source materials harvested from the U.S. National Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center and the UNESCO, OECD and World Bank archives, as well as interviews with key actors affiliated with the organisations. The paper adds to our understanding of the role of data, numbers and statistics in global governance, the role of international organisations in global governance and the history of international organisations in education.

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