In this article, I offer an examination of findings from a recently completed qualitative study conducted in the south-eastern region of the US. In the study, nine teachers from three different schools representing two different school districts were interviewed twice about how they dealt with their students' Stanford Achievement Test 10 (SAT 10) data to make instructional decisions. I frame the teachers' reported practices as responses formed in the context of the governmentality undergirding current accountability testing policy. Using the lens of Foucault's governmentality , makes it possible to see these "data-based" practices as neither "neutral," nor "objective," but vulnerable to educators' appropriation of "what is sayable and thinkable" within a local accountability context. Teachers' responses are seen as primarily shaped in discourses of meritocracy, deficit thinking and teachers' professional knowledge.