Teacher expectations are key predictors of student outcomes, yet how they are produced and negotiated in practice remains understudied. Drawing on ethnographic research in two progressive high schools serving low-income students of color, we show expectations function less as individually held stable beliefs than as institutionally situated judgments that are continuously produced and revised through interaction and interpretation. We identify three shared, institutionally sanctioned cultural logics—care, success, and accountability—guiding teachers’ decisions, showing how tensions between them created uncertainty about responding to students’ needs. Sometimes, these tensions produced expectation drift: the process through which what teachers ask of students decreases or shifts over time. Rather than a simple lowering of standards, expectation drift reflects negotiated responses to structural constraints and institutional pressures. By portraying expectations as socially constructed and context-dependent, we show how expectation drift may both support student learning and school engagement and contribute to processes of reproduction.
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