Teachers are often both collectively scape-goated for the shortcomings of education reform and praised as individuals in cases where reforms are interpreted as having been locally successful. This paper tries to give teacher voices a new space in discussions of education reform, by presenting the comments some teachers made on their work in relation to changes to the upper-secondary school in Sweden in the nineties from within a critical and postmodern framework for policy analysis. The paper is based on an ethnographic investigation involving one year of participant observation on a half-time basis in one school (mainly) in 1998 and 1999, and interviews and direct observation in another two. It begins with teachers' comments on strategies and ideas about how to work within the context of what was meant to be - from and on the basis of the reform of upper-secondary education in Sweden in 1994 - a new, integrated, upper-secondary school, based on a principle which up to 1994 had only been applied to the comprehensive sector. This principle is the principle of "one school for all pupils". The paper suggests that the blaming and praising of teachers for the success of reform initiatives is basically wrong. Almost all the teachers in the investigation were equally committed toward the democratic reform initiatives as expressed in official policy, and almost all of them had similar potentials to act in ways that could be interpreted as conducive to reform intentions. However, students were still separated and differentially treated and "qualified" in the new one school for all. The outcomes of the reform seemed to remain outside the direct influence of the teachers and imune to their actions and intentions. This applied however out of fashion such a statement may seem to be at the present conjuncture in education research.