Texas graduation rate worst in nation, again
Now that George W. Bush has taken his "Edumication Prezident" act to Washington, Americans are beginning to see what we here in Texas have known for some time: "No Child Left Behind" is a politically tasty, but ultimately unsatisfying and meaningless slogan.
Governor Goodhair has followed in Bush's footsteps, which largely means doing nothing except touting the value of standardized testing. The results speak for themselves.
For the second straight year, Texas has the lowest percentage of high school graduates in the nation, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study released Tuesday.
Seventy-seven percent of Texans age 25 and older had a high school degree in 2003, the same percentage as a decade earlier, when Texas ranked 39th in the country. So while other states have seen their graduation rates improve -- a record 85 percent of Americans have high school degrees -- Texas is treading water....
"The downside is Texas could be less competitive," said Steve Murdock at the Texas State Data Center at the University of Texas-San Antonio. "It could be poorer because we know educational attainment is the best predictor of income."
In 2002, the average high school dropout earned less than $19,000, compared with more than $27,000 for the typical graduate, according to the study....
In the Houston Independent School District, where 57 percent of the 211,000 students are Hispanic, administrators believe that as many as 40 percent of the city's students never graduate.
The sad thing is that it doesn't need to be this way. Through Texas Republicans pay grand lip service to the importance of education, the reality is far different. This is a state that will not fund new textbook purchases, that allows large funding disparities to exist between "have" and "have not" districts, and relies on the flawed Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test to gauge educational quality. The result is that we have districts with out-of-date textbooks (when there are textbooks at all). We have school districts that spend most of the school year teaching to the TAKS test instead of providing an education to students. Worst of all, we have a Governor and a Legislature that talks a good ballgame but provides little concrete support for education.
So how IS Texas supposed to compete? In the end, we'll have all the laborers, ditchdiggers, and construction workers you could ever want or need, but will be set to compete in an increasingly information-based world economy? Not unless Governor Goodhair and the Legislature remove their anteriors from their posteriors and fix the problem. If they cannot, or will not, then we owe it to ourselves to put people in office who will.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
