This chapter provides a model for how discourses about education flow through different sectors of society in providing the basis for education policy and then legitimating that policy. In developing this model, I look back at history of neoliberal reforms discussed in Chapter 3 and show how these reforms were justified using rhetoric about a “crisis in education.” That crisis rhetoric was deployed to explain the flagging economy of the early 1980s, as well as the perception that the United States was losing ground to countries like Germany and Japan in terms of competitive dynamism in automotive and computer technology. In essence, an economic crisis was discursively displaced to the educational realm, with teachers being disproportionately blamed for the country’s waning competitive edge: a discourse that was then employed in legitimating reforms designed to disproportionately hold teachers accountable for student performance.