It may be hard to imagine teams of high school educators--teachers, counselors, principals, central office leaders, curriculum specialists--working together to overcome the student achievement barriers of poverty, ethnicity, apathy, and inconsistencies in rigor and access to the curriculum in order to pursue the "ought-ness" of a better…

Promises to staff usually evolve around issues of working conditions and individual autonomy, but a staff's collective commitments to students can serve as a powerful catalyst for improved professional practice. In this article, the authors present two schools--Penasquitos Elementary School in San Diego, California, and Levey Middle School in…