No Child Left Behind legislation makes it clear that outside evaluators determine what gets taught in the classroom. It is important to ensure they measure what truly counts in school. This fact is poignantly and sadly true for the under funded, poorly resourced, "low performing" schools that may be hammered by administration accountants in the near future. However, the discrepancy between teaching and testing is equally important for high performing special schools, such as the North Carolina Governor's School. In this article, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of the North Carolina Governor's School curriculum--a 6-week residential program that gives students an opportunity to deepen and expand their academic knowledge through exposure to new points of view and divergent ways of thinking. The results of the study, which was composed of three studies that assessed the students' cognitive power, moral growth, and life possibilities awareness and openness expansion, yielded results that indicated a significant change in the student's mental lives. Overall, these studies suggest that the Governor's School program promoted a significant increase in students' logical reasoning and changed their sense of their futures. (Contains 1 table and 5 figures.)