LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 23, No. 2, October 2020 LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Learning http://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/LLT Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 255 EMPOWERING CARE’S EFFECTIVENESS FROM HIGH SCHOOL MATH TO COLLEGE ENGLISH: FROM STANDARDIZED TESTS TO STUDENT VOICES Deron Walker California Baptist University, USA correspondence: dwalker@calbaptist.edu DOI: doi.org/10.24071/llt.2020.230205 received 9 April 2020; accepted 8 June 2020 ***In this paper, Sunnyside High School, Inland Empire University (IEU) and Desert Valley, California will serve as pseudonyms to maintain the anonymity of the high school, university, district and city. Ms. Jasmine Espinoza and Dr. J. D. Hyde will represent the pseudonyms for the teacher-participants who taught the classes examined in this follow-up study. Abstract Building upon the prior success of a rookie high school math teacher, a veteran English professor also successfully implemented empowering care at a private university in that same urban setting in Southern California. The aforementioned empowering care that contributed to better student learning as measured by district wide tests at the high school level now demonstrated pedagogical success as assessed by student evaluations in the university setting. The purpose of this paper, chronicled from a practitioner’s point of view, examines how teacher beliefs that “all students are capable of learning,” operationalized concretely in terms of empowering care, enabled students to achieve impressive academic performances on the aforementioned measures in their respective settings over two consecutive school years (D. Walker & S. Walker, 2019). Keywords: empowering care, English education, enabling care, student evaluations Introduction When researchers originally decided to undertake some naturalistic research based on a rookie math teacher’s, (Ms. Jasmine Espinoza), classroom experiences at Sunnyside High School, in Desert Valley, California, no one realized just how applicable what this math teacher was doing in terms of empowering care would be to college level teaching in English education. At that time, the original study focused on researching the challenges of preparing teachers to meet the rather stringent expectations of state-level test-based accountability initiated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (D. Walker & S. Walker, 2019). Wills and Sandholtz (2009) have aptly defined the basic tension that California public school teachers often face in the era of test-based accountability that may have a