The North County Times has been awash in editorials, letters and commentaries regarding the achievement gap in our local schools. Most of them make valid points about a complex issue. Some place the responsibility on schools for failing "to keep an eye on students who are falling behind" (Dec. 11, "State data shows dropout rates on the rise") . I would like to add yet another perspective.

For 35-years, I have volunteered to teach writing classes for freshmen whose college entrance scores were high enough to get them into the University of San Diego but not high enough to guarantee they would succeed on our campus. Students in these courses come from every ethnic group, but they are predominantly from minority groups.

Often I would ask these students to share their K-12 experiences. Some described schools that were located in gang-ridden, violence-prone urban areas where teachers and students struggled to survive. These students should not have even made it to college. Yet, they did.

What made them different? Why did they become high achievers when their learning environments virtually guaranteed that they would fail and become just another statistic?

One young woman, an African-American student, stands out as a symbol of a student who succeeded in spite of insurmountable obstacles. This particular student made it to USD for only one reason: Her grandmother, a hardworking woman who labored at various backbreaking jobs all of her life, told her granddaughter from the time she was a young girl that she had to set her sights on college and let nothing get in her way. This student earned a bachelor's degree from USD, a master's degree from another university and is currently teaching college-level courses at other educational institutions. The attitude this student's grandmother instilled in her from the time she was a young girl was the motivating force that propelled her to this level of academic achievement.

Certainly, there are other factors -- overcrowded classrooms, lack of reading in the homes, language barriers, etc. -- that need to be addressed. However, my experience for the past 35 years convinces me that the attitude parents or other relatives instill in the homes is often the driving force that enables students who seem destined to fail to close the achievement gap.

Every semester, I give my students a copy of Charles Swindoll's statement on "Attitude," of which I will quote a part: "The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts … We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you -- we are in charge of our Attitudes."

Truthfully, the students who have succeeded in my classrooms, when everything seems to have conspired against them, already understood this. Someone in their homes taught them this little pearl of wisdom at a very early age.

Escondido resident Dennis M. Clausen is a freelance columnist for the North County Times and a professor of American literature at the University of San Diego.