What an embarrassment.

California ranks dead last on America's educational front.  Terry Jeffrey of CNS News has the data:

California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

Texas comes in second.  Both states are large and have major agricultural operations, which necessitates farm work.  Farm work doesn't require much education, and it's logical that people with that kind of an educational résumé would gravitate to that line of work.  The Sacramento Bee breaks down the educational levels by California city and shows that agricultural cities do lead the pack.

It's also an industry that's more than a little famous for hiring illegal aliens, and those are the ones who actually work for a living rather than live off California's vast welfare offerings.  Central American migrants, for instance, virtually all have less than a tenth-grade education and some of the lowest English-language proficiency skills in the entire world, according to the EF English proficiency index, which considers this skill a measure of development.  The lowest-educated people who are making California number one in that category are likely in one of those two categories.  Here's the other thing: lots and lots of low-education agricultural workers are keeping California from upgrading its agricultural operations, given their low cost.

But it's likely more complicated than that.  Combine it with a third factor in California, which is the low quality of its schools, made that way based on the high power of its teacher unions.  Someone who got ballot-harvested out of the midterms, Marshall Tuck, was an advocate for school quality, including school choice and charter schools, and intensely opposed by teacher unions.  He wasn't even a Republican or conservative; he was one of those guys President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, liked, a hipsterly guy who nevertheless was all in for better education if for nothing else than to supply Google with workers.  He got ballot-harvested in the last midterm based on the teacher unions' political muscle, losing to a useless left-wing political hack.  So rest assured: there isn't going to be any improved quality or outcome in education, particularly for people at the bottom rungs of the educational ladder, given that they have no choice but to go to teacher-union public schools.

Score one for the argument that Democrats have a vested interest in keeping the state at the bottom of the educational rankings, and schools will stay lousy because Democrats like it like that.

Don't think there isn't more.  Gavin Newsom came out not long ago and said he wanted to make California "number one" – not in educational achievement, but in per-pupil state spending.  More spending isn't going to put California any higher in the rankings, given that high, above-the-national average spending is what got California ranked dead last in the first place.  The high spending is to empower the state and its teacher unions.  Sorry, kids – Democrats like it that way.

Now let's get back to the illegals: recently, news accounts revealed that the foremost champion of illegal aliens with all this low education, the foreigners who break U.S. law so as to harvest its benefits for themselves, is the Catholic Church.  Illegal aliens and the Church's "programs" for them bring in a hefty $100-million taxpayer paycheck, which explains a lot about why they champion such lawlessness.  What it shows is that illegal immigration is big business for certain players in California, and more illegal aliens means more funding.

Don't ever let anyone tell you there aren't vested interests in California content with this dead-last ranking in education.  For a lot of the state's power players, ranking dead last is good times for the state and its bureaucrats and their acolytes as the money rolls in.