Teaching the poorest students is hard. In disadvantaged environments, students bring to schools real-life experiences that teachers must face when they try to educate them (Ladson-Billings, 2009). In many countries, the discrepancy between the well-to-do and the poorest segments of society have widened, and instead of furthering social mobility, the economic structure tends to confine marginalized students to permanent underclass status with increased class, ethnic, and cultural segregation (Carter & Welner, 2013). Under these circumstances, commitment to student learning –i.e. teacher identification with student needs, and teachers’ effort to invest to help students learn regardless of the difficulties associated with socio-economic adversity – is essential (Kushman, 1992). However, this commitment cannot be assumed.

Teaching poor students requires from educators a large investment of effort to overcome challenges not encountered in middle class settings. Often, teachers working under these circumstances make reference to values, meaning, and moral obligations to explain their commitment to their student (Lortie, 1975; Nias, 1989). Educators committed to work with marginalized students may be shaped by an ethic of service, said to be constitutive of the teaching profession (Lortie, 1975). Literature in education has described these educators as “dream keepers” (Ladson-Billings, 2009) or “social justice leaders” (Theoharis, 2007). In contradistinction to the idea of educators as social justice leaders, some authors have shown that attitudes of deficit thinking and blaming the victim have led teachers to reinforce social inequality at the school level (Anagnostopoulos, 2006). As a response, policymakers have introduced a combination of high-stakes accountability and market competition to regulate schools with the expectation of shoring up educators’ willingness to improve education quality. Some scholars have stated that these incentives-based policies have folded into schools a new ethics of high expectations based on calculation and self-interest (Ball, 2003).

Teacher commitment to students can be a function of an ethic of service, or a function of incentives-based policies that appeal to self-interest, or both. But these two sources of commitment may also conflict with each other and confront teachers with ethical dilemmas when they try to allocate effort to serve their students. Here, educators may find themselves working under conditions that appeal to their traditional ethic of service to support students who are extremely underserved. But also teachers are incentivized to keep test scores, enrollment, and attendance up, or face consequences. This may commit educators in a more strategic fashion so they can increase the likelihood of fulfilling organizational goals, which may lead them to neglect student needs. This dynamic may be exacerbated when teachers work under conditions of adversity. Adversity experienced by students in their life circumstances may create adversities for teachers on a daily base which may challenge teachers in their core competencies and their own needs for safety and well-being (Hart, 1994). In this context, teachers may engage in moral judgments about how to better serve marginalized students in the midst of poverty and the obligation to perform.

Teachers, as workers in other human service organizations, engage in moral work. That is, workers’ actions taken on behalf of clients not only represent technical aspects of their work, but also judgments of their social worth, causation of their problems, the desired outcomes, and deservingness of their effort (Hasenfeld, 2000). Therefore, teacher commitment to students facing adversity may be conditioned by those moral judgments that presumably shape teachers commitment based on either ethic of service or self-interest. In this context, this study asks: What moral judgments shape teacher commitment? Do teachers commit to students based on an ethic of service or based on self-interest? Is there a difference between more and less committed teachers in this regard?

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