Educational discourse, particularly since the advent of recent educational reform initiatives, has become saturated with a discourse of "high expectations." One can hardly hope to hold a conversation regarding the problems facing American schools without someone innocently remarking that of course students need to be held to "high expectations." For example, among the explicit goals of the Common Core is providing the "high standards" that are necessary for students to "have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life upon graduation from high school, regardless of where they live." The paradigm constructed by the Common Core and other recent educational reform initiatives that promote the standardization and measurement of knowledge contains a plethora of assumptions for to interrogate: achievement means the same thing for all students and can be standardized and measured; the goal of education is for all students to get a job to compete in a global economy; there is one objectively identifiable set of knowledge that leads to success in life (rather than multicultural or pluralistic approaches to education, one group gets to decide what constitutes knowledge); and teachers should not decide what works best for their individual students (Latino students in the South Bronx are no different from white students in rural Georgia). Setting such issues aside, this paper will focus primarily on what the author takes to be the discourse of "high expectations" and its pervasiveness in contemporary education reform.