As the school year begins, four educators sit around a dining room table, talking, laughing and arguing about the best way to measure student progress.

"We all have different educational philosophies," said Mary Coronado, 42, a vice principal at Fruitridge Elementary School in Sacramento. "We talk about it all the time. We'll still be arguing about this when we're 80."

The other teachers laugh and nod in agreement. They're confident that they will be debating their educational philosophies for years to come, because teaching has become their family tradition. This is just another afternoon at the Coronado family dinner table.

Sitting with Mary Coronado are her three younger brothers, all teachers in the Sacramento area: Ray Coronado, 36; Adolfo Coronado, 35, and David Coronado, 32. Their fifth sibling, 40-year-old JoAnn Coronado, is a preschool teacher in Tulelake, in Siskiyou County.

"We have built-in teacher collaboration just among our family," said David Coronado, a sixth-grade teacher at Samuel Kennedy Elementary School in Elk Grove. "But it's crazy how we ended up where we are."

The Coronados grew up in Tulelake, a tiny town near the Oregon border, in a family of migrant farmworkers. They remember waking up at 5 a.m. as children to pick potatoes.

"We all worked in the fields," said Mary Coronado. "We used to have to wear plastic bags up to our waist to stay dry."

Their family lived in barracks of the former Tulelake Internment Camp, which had been converted into duplexes for migrant farm workers after World War II.

Although the Coronados didn't move, they said that many of their friends - also from farmworker families - would come and go with the seasons.

"Summer, all of the other Mexican kids would come, then in September they would leave," said David Coronado. "They follow the jobs. Wherever the work is, they go."

In that environment, higher education often seemed like an unreachable goal, they said.

"A lot of those people that we knew from the camp didn't go on to finish their education," said Ray Coronado, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Beamer Elementary School in Woodland.

"It was never an option for them," added David Coronado. "They're still in the fields today."

The Coronados realized that education was their best chance to get ahead.

"We knew that we didn't want to do what our mom and dad were doing," said Ray Coronado. "We knew it was exhausting. I always kept this in my head - if I go to college, I'll come home mentally exhausted. If I don't go to college, I'll come home physically exhausted."

Today, the youngest of the siblings, David Coronado, has decorated his sixth-grade classroom at Samuel Kennedy Elementary School in Elk Grove with a "college wall." Underneath a sign that says "Today Decides Tomorrow," he has pasted signs and banners from dozens of colleges around the country: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, UC Davis, and, of course, his family's alma mater, Chico State.

In front of his students, Coronado's shoulders square, his back straightens, and he's in his element. The Coronado siblings all agree that after years in Northern California potato fields, the classroom is where their family belongs.

"We don't try to be heroes, we're just trying to do our jobs," said Mary Coronado. "If we ultimately touch their lives, it makes us as teachers - and as people - so much happier."

Mary Coronado, the oldest of the siblings, was the first in the family to go to college - but it wasn't easy.

"It was really hard to break out," she said. "Even my dad was like, 'What do you mean, you're going to college?' "

Her inspiration to go to Chico State came from Maxine Bigler, then area director for a migrant education program of the Butte County Office of Education.

"The family didn't think there was a chance for her to go to college," said Bigler, now a 65-year-old retiree. "I went to Tulelake and spoke with her father personally and invited her down to Chico State."

Bigler took Mary Coronado, then 16, on a tour of the Chico State campus.