The 14th World Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), held in Istanbul in June 2010, was entitled "Bordering, re-bordering and new possibilities for change in education and society". It opened with this address, in which the author explores how the idea of a norm works for education using key benchmarking mechanisms such as the Global Monitoring Report (GMR). Aside from the issues of equality and access to education, the question of quality is at the heart of debates almost everywhere. From the very beginning of comparative education as a field right up to where we find ourselves today, an abiding concern has been how we might learn from the education systems of others to improve our own. Critical, for the purposes of this discussion, is the assumption that we have reached a point in educational development in these mechanisms, in what we value and for which we will hold each other accountable, where we give no status to hierarchy. The author is essentially interested in the question of whether we have a sufficiently robust universal understanding of "value" and quality.