Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

As many as one-third of the students who should graduate from Texas high schools don't. Instead, they drop out.

The cost is high enough for the individuals who don't earn as much as they would with high school diplomas or college degrees.

For Texas, the cost is astronomical.

"The 2.5 million students, twice the population of San Antonio, who have dropped out of school in the past 20 years represent $730 billion in lost revenue and costs for the state of Texas," Frances Deviney, the director for Texas Kids Count, told Hearst Newspapers.

Each year's high school graduating class has about 120,000 fewer students than started the ninth grade. In the state's urban areas, as many as 50 percent of students do not graduate. The cost in lost opportunities hits young Hispanic and African-American Texans particularly hard, with as many as 60 percent of them dropping out, Hearst reported, based on data from the Texas Public School Attrition Study for 2005-2006 by the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association.

The association's data report that 45 percent of Victoria high school students drop out before graduating. The rate is higher for Hispanics, 59 percent, and African Americans, 39 percent, than for Anglos, 22 percent.

As the state's minority populations increase, these high dropout rates reduce the likelihood that the need for Hispanic and African-American professionals to serve the communities whose cultures they share can be met.

"If you live in a city like Dallas or Houston, and half of your kids are not finishing high school, it's a social crisis, because we know that those kids will likely live in poverty, be much more likely to go to jail, and they will have more health problems," Eileen Coppola, a researcher at Rice University's Center for Education, told Hearst.

  The 79th Texas Legislature last year gave each public school district in the state $275 per high school student to develop programs to reduce the dropout rate and to better prepare more students for college. While it is still too early to tell whether that funding will accomplish much, if anything, its critics say it is not targeted specifically enough.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who worries about the dropout crisis that he calls "a huge problem," wants lawmakers to look more closely at dropout reduction and how to spend scarce dollars more effectively.

"I want to focus on programs at your high-risk schools. How do we keep those at-risk kids in school? We'll be looking at that this session. This is a priority of mine," the lieutenant governor told Hearst.

In his column today, The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr. writes about the Harlem Children's Zone, which serves 9,000 children in a 97-square-block, predominantly minority area of New York City. When it comes to schools, smaller classes and better-paid teachers matter there.

But schools are only one component of the social tapestry that the zone's leaders are weaving to meet the needs of the kids they serve. As Pitts explains, an array of human services programs is also critically important. Children who are hungry or sick or frightened cannot learn. Kids who see little or no hope for productive, successful lives are not likely to invest their effort in building such lives for themselves.

Whatever the 80th Texas Legislature does to address the state's growing dropout crisis will not be enough if it focuses only on high schools. The social pathologies generally start much earlier than that and have to be addressed in elementary schools. But even that is not enough because the factors that push kids to drop out come from both on and off campus.

Texas certainly needs to build a world-class system of public education that offers every student the opportunity to learn what she or he needs to know to succeed in this ever-more-globalized 21st century. Lawmakers need to give public schools the tools - including adequate funding - to offer superior, not merely adequate, education. Beyond that, lawmakers need to give schools the tools to identify students at risk of dropping out - not beginning when they enter high school, but much earlier.

This has to come in conjunction with ensuring that youngsters who need and will not have access to this without state funding will have healthy diets, full health care and the level of public safety needed to protect them from gangs and illegal drugs.

Some will say that costs too much. But how much is too much? Compare it with the "$730 billion in lost revenue and costs for the state of Texas" from dropouts over the past two decades, then project the higher cost of higher numbers as the state's population climbs. Compare it, as Pitts does, with the cost of locking up dropouts who graduate to lives of crime, especially violent crime.

Earlier this month, newly inaugurated Texas Comptroller Susan Combs projected that the state will have a $14.3 billion surplus over the next biennium. Surely some of that should go to target the state's dropout crisis before it costs Texas even more.