This paper sets out to understand the process of service industry subject formation as read through a combination of charter school policy handbooks and fast-food employee training manuals. I draw from the experience of teaching and organising in order to theorise two functions of subject formation, and a third ideological continuity holding that relation together. Looking at both the surveillance of labor and the reemergence of Taylorism, as a guiding principle within education, I theorise the function of these concepts and connect them with the narrative and contradiction of college readiness-as-economic mobility.