Guest Column: Students' success begins in the belief system

An extraordinary thing happened last month in Granger, a small, impoverished town in the Yakima Valley where most adults and many children work in the fields cutting asparagus, picking cherries and sorting apples. More than 90 percent of the Class of 2008 -- almost all of whom are low-income -- graduated from high school on time. Another couple of students will be graduating this summer.

That's not all -- a whopping 90 percent of the 62 graduates are going on to some kind of post-secondary education. Thirty-seven percent are going directly to four-year colleges, 14 percent to technical schools and more than a third to two-year colleges.

Those statistics are normally associated with much wealthier schools. Schools like Granger, where 90 percent of the students are low-income, 80 percent Latino and 10 percent American Indian, often graduate fewer than half of their students.