Seventeen-year-old Deryle Daniels Jr. serves on his school's junior class council, plays varsity football and basketball, and participates in the Youth Leadership Institute. A student at Chapel Hill (N.C.) High School, Daniels maintains a 3.8 grade-point average. He is one of four African American students in his AP U.S. history class this year, is one of three in junior honors English, and was the only African American student in his AP world history class last year.

While closing the widely publicized "achievement gap" is a high priority for the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), an equally important item on the group's agenda is to understand what makes students like Daniels tick. Why do some African American and Latino students thrive while others-even those from well-educated, middle-class families-underachieve relative to their white and Asian American peers?

From September 30 through October 2, 2004 the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) held its fifth annual national student conference in Princeton, N. J. to discuss and prioritize educational policy recommendations. While many educational conferences boast a roster of leading scholars, this conference is unique-these education advocates are high-achieving African American and Latino students and "promising scholars." This national consortium, formed from 25 school districts, aims to discover, develop, and implement the means to ensure high academic achievement for African American and Latino students across the country. While the students broke into groups of nine to create their recommendations for raising minority achievement, many ideas were echoed across the teams.

Literature textbooks line the shelves of Bill Moore's classroom at North Junior High School, and his seventh graders grasp their pencils, their journals lying open on their desks. A poster outlining "How to Write a Paper" shares wall space with the vocabulary of literary devices: metaphor, simile, alliteration.

The morning's journal topic is "Where do you use math?" Moore displays a bar graph showing enrollment in different college courses and asks his class what the numbers mean. Is this an English class or a math class? The answer is, well, yes. The blending of English and math is the way of the world at North Junior High as it strives to lift achievement in both-all to satisfy new federal mandates under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush's signature education law.

"Believe!" "Keep the faith!" These have been the refrains of Red Sox fans for nearly a century. Their perpetual optimism in spite of decades of defeat echoes another refrain familiar to educators: "All children can succeed; never give up!"

Now that the Sox have finally "reversed the curse," the lessons of their 2004 World Series victory will undoubtedly generate new refrains. . . .We think these lessons have special salience for educators. Like the pre-2004 Sox, many educators have long resisted the kind of rigorous research and scientific analysis that could identify the curricula and teaching strategies most likely to help children succeed in school.