This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article examines leaders' engaging with the textual products of NCLB and discursively supporting and challenging global narratives of education in the service of the economy. It shows leaders reinventing NCLB's accountability mandates as they interpret, translate, and contest the global discourse of competition, standardization, and accountability that undergirds the federal policy.