The 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) have been marked by a continuing struggle by African American scholars and urban education advocates to promote educational excellence for African American students and other students of color. A number of qualitative and observational studies converge in their finding that African American students might learn best in an environment whose style is relational and personal, like an extended family in which high expectations for all are met with an accountability for self and others. In any known studies, however, researchers have not yet developed a quantitative measure of teachers' beliefs regarding culturally relevant practices in classrooms serving African American children. Furthermore, researchers have not systematically examined how teachers' beliefs vary with student achievement. Here, the authors build on the previous studies to achieve three goals: (a) create survey items that measure teachers' culturally relevant beliefs from Ladson-Billings (1994); (b) sample beliefs of those who teach primarily African American children in urban public schools; and (c) ascertain which teacher beliefs correlate with higher student achievement. They conducted two studies in pursuit of the three goals. In Study 1, they sampled the beliefs of teachers within six urban schools. In Study 2, they correlated the beliefs of teachers from two of the six schools with their students' aggregated achievement measured on mathematics, reading, and language arts standardized tests. They expected that the beliefs of a broad sample of teachers would vary more than would those of successful teachers from prior studies because we did not select our participants according to their reputation for success. Also, they expected that teachers who endorsed beliefs consistent with successful teachers of prior studies would teach students with higher academic achievement. The results of these studies brought to the forefront issues for further investigation and contribute to the literature on excellence in urban education. (Contains 1 note.)