In this article, I present six English teachers' perceptions of the dialogue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy mandates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers' experiences as professionals and how these policies and the language used to convey them influenced the teachers' autonomy and their instructional decisions. I found that these teachers' perceived that policymakers employed an authoritative discourse (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) that made it difficult for them to engage in dialogue with the policy mandates they received. The stories told by these teachers offer some insight into the culture of U.S. education, a culture that has historically marginalized and ignored the expertise of the teachers charged with educating future generations.