If you want to see America's future, come to Sunset High School in Oak Cliff.

That's where you'll find it, if you buy the idea that America's destiny is linked to its growing Latino population. And it would be hard not to, when you consider the numbers in America's second-largest state. A demographer told a House committee last week that Latino children, by far, make up the largest group of Texas children under age 5.

Sunset mirrors that shift here, the one also rippling across America. A Dallas high school that once educated a largely white student body is now 95 percent Hispanic.

That may seem irrelevant to a suburban parent shuttling between kid soccer games, but the plight of lower-income Latino students, like Sunset's, should matter enormously. This is not a trend you can move farther away from having to face.

Look at it this way: When baby boomers in the burbs ease into retirement, Texas will need educated Latinos working their way up in corporations, caring for the frail in hospitals and running for political office. Today's suburbanites will need educated Latinos with earning power to buy those four-bedroom homes once boomers begin downsizing to condos. No other demographic group is growing fast enough to fill such needs.

That's why the Sunsets matter, regardless of our address, and why we should praise their success.

Sunset, a dark-red-brick campus along Jefferson Boulevard south of the Trinity River, outperformed its peer schools in one key indicator, adding more academic growth to its students – more than any other Dallas high school, including Townview, which regularly shows up on surveys as one of America's top high schools.

What does this mean?

The Dallas school district has internal benchmarks that show how much "value" classrooms add each year. Last year, Sunset did better than any DISD high school in helping students improve in various subjects.

Tony Tovar, the fast-talking former coach who leads the 2,200-student campus, attributes the breakthrough to interventions with struggling students. The approaches include creating an "academic corps" for after-school teaching and launching special tutoring for students with limited English skills.

Or, as Tovar told me, "We tried to break things down like a golf swing."

Now, here's the realistic part. I may be thrilled, but Sunset students still can't compete equally with the kids from suburbia, much less the ones from China and India who will be tomorrow's engineers and scientists.

Consider Sunset's students with limited English skills, who make up about 25 percent. In each grade, they lag far behind their peers in such areas as math and reading.

You can't find a tougher education problem. Deborah Stipek, Stanford University's education dean, told The Dallas Morning News editorial board last week that schools may need to rethink the four-year high school model for students with limited English skills.

She has a point. Perhaps those kids need longer to graduate; perhaps they should be so immersed in English that they spend a year doing nothing but learning the language.

I am not sure which, but I do know that kids who arrive in the ninth grade with a fourth-grader's English reading skills will face enormous odds. Give up? Hardly. The best words George W. Bush ever uttered were about not buying into the "soft bigotry of low expectations." But at least we should have enough bilingual teachers to reach these kids.

This is where Education Secretary Arne Duncan could invest some of that money the Obama administration wants to put into schools. Clearly, schools in the many states with growing Latino populations face the same problems as Sunset.

For the moment, though, let's cheer Sunset. Even if its progress is incomplete, it's progress. If Sunset and schools like it continue on that trajectory, America wins.

William McKenzie is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist and a moderator of Texas Faith. His e-mail address is wmckenzie@dallasnews.com.