This presentation will focus on shared characteristics of the Danish national standardized testing in public school and files from educational psychologists applied [skolejournalerne] in special need education in order to point to societal changes in the comprehension of education, assessment, evaluation and learning. The overall point of the presentation is to point to potentiality and optimization as main technologies of governance in education. The theoretical framework is based on a Foucault inspired understanding of the subject and technologies inspired by an analysis of the history of problematizations in Danish Schools. The presentation is based on different methods that stems from research in general education on the one hand and from special needs education on the other. That is, ethnographic inspired fieldwork in Danish public schools in order to observe how the national standardized testing is handled and interviews in order to investigate concrete meaning constellations connected to participation in test situations. Furthermore the methods consist of analysis of political documents concerning the Danish national standardized tests. On the other hand, the presentation is based on an analysis of files from educational psychologists applied in [skolejournaler] from special need education. A central point in the presentation is how these different types of empirical material can be merged which is both an analytical point that focuses on the existence of potentiality and optimization which are present across the different empirical material in different ways and a methodological point as well. By merging the different empirical studies we intend to show how technologies like potentiality and optimization can be analyzed in in public schools as well as in special needs education.