Inequitable outcomes from schooling are an enduring and global concern. Large scale data sets of achievement in the form of international and national standardised tests provide geographies of the effects of schooling. Our interests as educational researchers have focused on mapping the local contours of schooling through the use of ethnographically informed approaches to research. In this paper, we consider the implications for ethnographers of schooling of setting aside standard measurements of space and time, for example, to examine how these phenomena are made meaningful and made to matter in particular ways through practices of knowing. We investigate what changes when processes intended to reflect what is 'real' are replaced by performative understandings of knowledge-making. We ground this discussion in three ethnographic studies that provide starting points for reconceptualizing the meaning making of ethnographic practices.