In the United States (US), an increase in standardization, quantification, competition, and large-scale comparison--cornerstones of neoliberal accountability--have been accompanied by devices of transparency, through which various forms of school data are made available to the public. Such public reporting, we are told by politicians and education officials, is essential for improving schools and reforming education. Using a framework of political spectacle, we reveal, however, that such transparency does more to legitimize the political action of those who promote transparency in education than it does to reform schooling. In fact, drawing on ethnographic data collected in New York City (NYC) between 2005 and 2011, we interrogate the ways in which politicians, state education officers, city officials, school district, educational leaders, and the media use the transparency of numbers and quantified accounts of academic achievement to draw attention away from the ways in which NCLB negatively impacts poor, Black, and Latino youth. We demonstrate that transparency selectively magnifies the ways in which NYC is making schools more accountable, and strategically hides the persistent racial and class achievement gaps. Finally, we discuss how, in the rush to provide evidence to the federal government, to states, and to the public, exuding confidence through transparency has emerged victorious over generating accurate data in order to attend to the disparities in American public schools.