In education, contemporary discussions of standards and standardisation often appear incidentally, as part of the critique of particular standardisation projects, such as national or international assessments and comparisons. This review essay focuses not on particular standards but more broadly on how standards develop, how they participate in our world and how we might understand, study and put them to work. The three books reviewed here, between them, represent some of the most important interdisciplinary research and commentary on standardisation. Although the books are not recent, and none of the books deal with education as a main focus (it gets a mention in Lawrence Busch's book), they have been chosen for review here because standardisation plays a central role in contemporary education policies and practices. The books reviewed are: (1) "Standards: Recipes for Reality," by Lawrence Busch, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2011; (2) "The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care," by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003; and (3) "Standards and their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life," edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2009.