For the last three decades, the goal of improving quality in educational institutions in Germany as well as in Sweden has been devised and extensively promoted. Even if it appears to be the same all over the world, the concept of quality is not only determined by international and national policies, it is also subject to historical and discourse-related changes: It is culturally formed. Different interpretive patterns are applied, and there is not even always coherence between practice and theory. The leading hypothesis of this contribution is that neither of the two nations share the same material and ideological conditions for work on quality, nor is their handling of metric data the same. In this article, some of the historical developments and phenomena that can explain the differences of discussions and positioning in Sweden and Germany will be outlined and compared with each other from a pragmatic-ethnographic perspective, not least with the goal to find a common ground for defining pedagogical quality.