The authors use Noddings (1984; 1992; 1999) and Beauboeuf-Lafontant's (2002) theories of caring in education to look at how race (conceptualized to include Whiteness) affected the implementation of the A+ Schools Program, an arts-based reform designed to augment student achievement and appreciation for the arts. They examine the implementation of the A+ Schools Program in three very different schools, with a particular focus on instruction and pedagogy. One school, Mountain Top, located in the mountains in the western part of North Carolina is all White. The second school, Piedmont Elementary, is located in an urban setting in the center of the state. Predominantly African American, it is more racially diverse than the other two schools, with Whites comprising about 20% of the population. The third school, Jackson, located in a rural, northeast corner of the state, is over 90% African American. These cases illustrate the importance of race in understanding how caring and educational reform are defined and enacted in schools. The authors maintain that the enactment of caring and educational reform must include claiming a school's racial identity and an acknowledgement that the world is a place where race matters. Furthermore, they assert that both caring and the interpretation of educational reform are not racially neutral. Reform expresses the race of the people who design it and those who implement it. Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers must make race an explicit focus of educational reform rather than merely letting race play out in unexamined ways. Their analysis in this article explicitly contradicts the ideology of colorblindness.