Historically, education policy has frequently framed American Indians, a contested term long-used to describe peoples indigenous to the United States, through a deficit-lens as "other." While "CER" publishes research that looks at other countries as a point of analysis, rarely has it included articles that compare supposedly internally autonomous territories (like American Indian reservations) to the so-called mainstream systems that surround them. This vertical case study explores how a state department of education applied a comparative lens when implementing a school accountability system and intervening in a priority school located on an American Indian reservation. The study finds that policy makers, comparative education researchers, and the field of comparative education have roles to play in attending to the sociocultural and sociohistorical contexts of policy implementation and committing to work in "Third Spaces" where official policy knowledge and the local knowledge to come together in transformational ways.