Through an in-depth, multi-case study of five schools and forty-seven teachers, I examine how teacher commitment to students plays out under conditions of socioeconomic adversity in elementary and middle schools. Relying on different sources of literature, I theorize that commitment is the degree of educators’ determination to respond to student needs. Empirically, I explore how individual teachers perceive and respond to student needs in a context where students bring more needs than educators can handle. I also analyze whether conventional factors drawn from the literature are associated with they way teachers respond to student needs.

The findings show that teachers express their commitment as a trade-off between responsiveness and boundary-setting in the face of student needs. In the midst of this struggle, teachers are forced to draw a line between the needs that they are able to handle and the ones that they are not. Following this rationale, four types of commitment were identified: alienated, restricted, conditional, and boundless. These four types of commitment describe a spectrum of determination to respond to student needs from the lowest (alienated) to the highest (boundless). Findings also show that none of the factors theorized – expectations, self-efficacy, ethic of service, deservingness, and self-interest –distinguish teachers with stronger commitment from those with lower commitment in a straightforward manner. Rather, a set of more subtle factors differentiates more committed teachers from less committed teachers: hope, internal locus of control, a sense of meaning from transforming social disparities, valuing students as morally deserving, and meaningful integration of organizational demands with student needs.

This study makes three contributions. It understands commitment as a phenomenon that involves behaviors and attitudes. It advances a new understanding of commitment as a trade-off between responding to student needs and boundary-setting, which softens the conventional dichotomy between committed and not-committed educators. Finally, it offers a set of novel attributes that describes higher commitment to students in the midst of the struggle to serve children in extraordinarily adverse circumstances.

Implications indicate that school leaders and policy makers should pay careful attention to teachers’ struggles to serve students who bring more needs than educators can handle. Understanding this discrepancy may lead to better strategies to soften the effects of poverty on teacher work. Also, understanding commitment as a trade-off between responsiveness and boundary-setting opens a space of influence for school leaders to gauge and support teacher work beyond the conventional dichotomy between “committed” and “not-committed” educators.