This report by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) focuses squarely on strategies for instructional improvement in American high schools. Specifically, this study examines how high schools that perform below average incorporate their state’s accountability goals into their own goals, identify their challenges, and search for strategies for instructional improvement. We focus on how high schools of differing performance levels and contexts, residing in states with different forms of high-stakes accountability and support systems, identify, understand, and respond to the gap between their current levels of performance and external expectations for their performance.