At present, European education policy, research and administration is dominated by a specific concept of reform, namely so-called output governance, whose rise to prominence in national contexts in the 1990s coincided with the advance of international tests of school performance such as PISA. In this article it is argued that there is much more to this form of governance than a phenomenon that arose "naturally" after the fall of the Iron Curtain. This is brought out by tracing the development of output governance within the OECD--which publishes the PISA reports--and highlighting the key factors, events and structures in its dissemination from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It is contended that output governance's epistemological roots lie in military research on war and that it was professionalised during the cold war by institutions that were trying--by setting specific goals--to compensate for their negligible capacity to pursue input governance. The OECD is a textbook case of such an institution. Specifically, it is argued that the OECD professionalised and disseminated a form of output governance--forged chiefly in and catalysed by the United States--that promised to give the organisation greater control over national policies and administrative bodies and thus help it enforce its education policy agenda. In light of these insights it is concluded that--despite there being no compelling reason to do so--European states are increasingly embracing a form of educational governance that is fostering an expertocratic, decontextualised approach to school administration.