This book describes how administrators, teachers, and students in three high schools have worked to improve their schools. The schools; a suburban vocational-technical school, an urban school for immigrant English-language learners, and an urban second-chance school for students who have failed elsewhere. All operate as, what the books calls, communities of commitment. The book describes how these schools are organized, how they use adult-student relationships to leverage high levels of student performance, how they enact teaching and learning for making meaning, and how they confront the challenges they encounter. It also discusses the systemic conditions for sustaining and scaling up schools. The book is organized into five sections: (1) "Schools as Communities of Commitment"; (2) "Organizing Schools To Be Communities of Commitment"; (3) "Caring Relationships: The Main Thing"; (4) "Teaching and Learning for Making Meaning"; and (5) "Possibilities for Schools as Communities of Commitment: What It Takes." Appended are examples of documents (class schedules, steering committee goals, international curriculum, course catalog, best practices) from the three schools that illustrate the day-to-day operation of the schools, which can be adapted to fit other schools contexts. (WFA)