The accountability paradigm for reforming public schools began in the U.S. as a state-based initiative grounded in establishing state standards for core content and developing high-stakes tests and schedules to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable (Hout and Elliott, 2011). This essay examines the test-based patterns of that paradigm over the past thirty years by confronting testing as a mechanism of surveillance (Foucault, 1984) and then examining the accountability era in South Carolina as an example of the power and failure of accountability based on tests. Tests remain powerful, I contend, because they reinforce the investment-and-return vernacular that reflects and reinforces Americans' faith in capitalism over democracy.