In the last decades great efforts have been made in many countries to build education systems that are hoped to enable raised quality, expressed in terms of better learning outcomes and higher goal achievement. One of the most highlighted keys for this development is the crucial role of the teacher expressed in international educational policy documents like ‘Teachers matter’ and ‘Nothing beats a good teacher’ (OECD 2005, 2009, 2011; National Agency for Education 2010). To analyze how those intentions are interpreted and enacted by different local, public and private educational actors, this paper will investigate how one country, Sweden, has decided on a career reform for teachers and specifically how this is enacted at a local level.