The institutional environment of US school systems has changed considerably over a quarter century as standards and test-based accountability became central ideas in both policy texts and discourses about improving education. We explore how US school systems are managing in this changed environment by focusing on school system leaders' sense-making about their environments as they attempt to build education systems in order to improve instruction, the core technology of schooling. We identify the policy texts and discourses system leaders notice and their framings, interpretations, and uses of these cues as they work on building educational infrastructures to support more coherent instructional visions. We argue that school systems' educational infrastructure building efforts were intended at coupling their systems' formal organization with particular environmental cues in an effort to influence classroom instruction. In turn, we argue that these educational infrastructure building efforts can simultaneously be motivated by, and in pursuit of, both institutional ritual and technical rationality. [This paper was published in "Educational Policy" v33 n6 p845-881 2019 (EJ1225591).]