The National Education Association reported this week that Texas is the only state that has decreased spending on students and now ranks $1,500 below the national average when it comes to spending per student.  I can’t say it’s any big surprise, especially after visiting various schools throughout Dallas where the zip code seems to play a determining factor in dividing the have’s from the have-nots.

Governor Perry has gone on record saying that educational spending in the state is more than adequate. Maybe that’s true for schools in wealthier districts where families can afford to supplement the state’s shortage, but those schools that are located in urban districts and have a student body where the majority are students of color and low-income aren’t as lucky. In fact, it’s a known fact that these students are at greater risk for not completing high school.

In the “Guide to the Education of Our Children” published by ( http://www.dfwinternational.org/ ) DFW International Community Alliance, it’s reported that on average, 50 percent of Latino students don’t graduate from high school. That’s a troubling figure when you realize that by 2025 Hispanics will be 43 percent of the DFW area’s population.

As it stands now, in DISD alone, 68 percent of Latino students are dropping out of school.

Critics will always blame the parents and the kids themselves, but for kids to want to come to school, the school has to be an environment that is not only conducive to teaching and learning but in making the child want to be there.

We already know, courtesy of a study released this month by the Pew Hispanic Center, that Latino teenagers are more likely than black or white students to attend public high schools that are overcrowded, have the highest concentration of poor students, and the highest student-teacher ratios.

And as encouraging as it was to learn that DISD had commissioned an audit on how to improve student performance, it was shockingly disappointing to learn that not all the schools are teaching the same skills to students at the various grade levels.

It’s no wonder that some public high schools in DISD can offer more advanced placement classes than others. If kids aren’t being taught the same skills to prepare them for college courses, it makes sense that kids who are less prepared are smart enough to know it and realistic enough to understand they don’t have a chance to score high enough on college placement exams to be considered for college.

To implement the changes that DISD plans to make is going to take dinero — beyond what Gov. Perry feels is adequate.

But it just makes sense that it would be money well spent if we could just get half of all Latino students to stay in school, and do something more with their lives than work a dead-end job.

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