There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education. The article explores the paradoxes of practical research through a history of the present. Different historical lines activated in contemporary research are discussed: (a) the object of practical knowledge is making kinds of people; (b) the sciences about changing the present embody desires about the potentialities of society and people that research is to actualize; and (c) the "useful, practical knowledge" paradoxically embodies comparative styles of reasoning that inscribe inequality in the search for equality. The argument focuses on science as "an actor" in governing. It argues that governing in modernity occurs less through brute force (although it is still present) and more through the principles that order and classify conduct. The sciences of the modern school are central in this governing. The article methodologically draws on social and cultural histories, science and technology studies, and studies of the politics of knowledge. [This paper was presented as a keynote speech at the European Educational Research Conference (ECER), Bolzano, Italy, September 4-7, 2018.]