Texas Ranks Dead Last in High School Graduates

This is taken from today's Texas House Democratic Caucus Monday Memo:
In a study released last week, we were told that Texas has the lowest percentage of high school graduates in the nation for the second straight year. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 77 percent of Texans age 25 and older had a high school degree in 2003, the same percentage as 10 years ago when Texas ranked 39th nationally. Meanwhile, graduation rates have improved in other states so that now a record 85 percent of Americans have high school diplomas...State demographer Steve Murdock told the Houston Chronicle that Texas' ranking could harm the state's economy as less-educated people enter the work force. "The downside is Texas could be less competitive," he said. "It could be poorer because we know educational attainment is the best predictor of income." In 2002, the average salary for those with only high school diplomas was $27,280, while the average for dropouts was $18,826...If the state continues to rank dead last in the number of students who graduate...then no companies will want to set up shop in Texas. This is why any school finance proposal should look first at providing our schools with the funding necessary for all our children to obtain academic execllence ...
MY THOUGHTS: How can we continue to elect state representatives that sit idly by while our state continues to slip further and further behind? This is not a statistic that makes me proud to be a Texan.