This paper provides a narrative account describing how a first-year teacher's empowering care in her mathematics classes in an inner-city high school in Southern California contributed to better student learning and helped raise district-wide test scores. The purpose of the article, chronicled from a practitioner's point of view, examines how teacher beliefs that "all students are capable of learning," operationalised concretely in terms of empowering care, enabled students to achieve impressive academic performances as measured by the district standardised tests during the recent school year. Through applying the research methodologies of narrative inquiry and conversation analysis to interpret the data, this study focuses on how students from impoverished, urban neighbourhoods started to believe in themselves. As a result, these students demonstrated that they could improve their learning in Algebra I and consistently perform better on district tests, outperforming other classes at their school and other schools within the district.