TAB Uses Local Chambers of Commerce to Do Their Dirty Work:
Here is what is on the TAB website regarding an upcoming conference in 2014. It appears they are now the organization behind Chambers of Commerce. It also appears that they have lobbying to do in the 2015 Legislative Session.
Event Description:
2014 TAB Biennial
Chamber Partners Conference
The environment in which the businesses chambers serve is shaped by
decisions made in Austin each biennium. Whether transportation, environmental
regulations, tax policy, healthcare, or other topics chambers must be in the know, leading
the conversation, educating and advocating on behalf of the business community.
Therefore, TAB invites you to join the discussion regarding the legislative
priorities of the state chamber and other regional issues at the 2014 TAB Chamber Partners
Conference.
The strength of the chamber community as a whole is its voice, united as one working
toward the same goals for the businesses served in Texas. Together we must educate
and inform! Together we must engage and be heard in the process! Together we
must advocate on behalf of our members.
Join us December 2 to 3 at the DoubleTree University Hotel, as together we will learn and
prepare for the 2015 Legislative Session to ensure as chambers of commerce we continue to
create the best business climate for our members to operate.
*****************************************
Here is a letter written by their current president which appeared on Editorial pages all over Texas a couple of months ago. It is followed by my reply to the article when it appeared in the Houston Chronicle. See for yourself what they are proposing and advocating.
Texas has made great strides in getting more students of all backgrounds on the path to a higher education at our community colleges and four-year institutions. We are seeing record enrollment year in and year out and that is something to be proud of.
The other end of the higher-education story is far more disheartening. While we are getting more and more students in, we are not doing enough to get them out with a degree or certificate.
Try as we might, we simply are not seeing an increase in college completion rates. It is unacceptable for a student to put time, money and effort into an education and then not walk across the stage with a degree at the end of the process.
This lack of higher-education completion could be deadly to our economy. Today, only around 30 percent of Texas' 25-to 35-year-olds have some kind of degree or career certificate. That is 10 percent below the national average.
According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, out of 100 eighth-graders, only 12 will earn a college degree or post-secondary career certificate in 10 years.
We must make changes that will help students navigate college at a price both they and their parents can afford and in a time frame that will put them into the workforce.
Complete College America, a national nonprofit that helps students meet their career goals, calls these ideas "game changers." I call them common sense.
Our Legislature this session put part of one of the CCA recommendations in place - tying 10 percent of community college funding to increasing completion rates. We support expanding that to every state-funded college and university. Money is a great motivator for getting change and results.
There are many students who want to go to college but simply aren't ready academically. At the community college level, about 10 percent of the students would be better off in adult basic education, and at the four-year schools, some students should get remediation from a community college before entering the four-year university setting.
We must also consider changing remediation so that students can use those skills immediately to pass courses that count toward graduation - for instance, allowing them to take a remedial algebra course at the same time they take college algebra.
When a student enters a situation that they are not ready for, more times than not that leads to failure.
Students are not finishing college on time. I believe we need to redefine what it means to be a full-time student.
For many academic programs, it takes 15 credit hours per semester to complete the degree in four years. Currently, to be considered a full-time student, it only takes 12 credit hours per semester. Do you see the problem? The number of hours it takes to earn a degree should be what we consider full time.
More scheduling flexibility would help students who work to be able to group their classes into a time block and group their work into another time block and ensure they would have some time left to study and rest. That would be a great help to students who are working their way through school maintain a full time class load. Keeping students on a so-called "guided pathway," setting out a clear road map with clear goals that end in a degree, will also mean more success.
If Texas is to maintain a competitive workforce in the 21st century, we simply must do better. I know we can.
Bass is board chairman for the Texas Association of Business.
The Chronicle web site, flawed as usual, wouldn't post my comment, so I include it here. MM
Mr. Bass, you are addressing the symptoms and not the cure.
Students can't finish college because they haven't been educated properly in elementary
schools. Blame yourself! Texas business associations (TBEC, Business Roundtable, national
and local Chambers of Commerce, et al and read about them elsewhere on this web site)
colluded and conspired to dumb down our public school students beginning in the 1990's so
they could have plenty of malleable, complacent workers who could put Part A to Part B and
not complain about low wages! (Thus the swing toward vocational education [and "training"]
instead of an academic liberal arts education as Americans had always enjoyed for the last
379 + or - years!)
Public schools used to be the equalizer, letting us all get a basic academic education
that allowed us to do what we wanted to do after we had finished 12 years of school. Only
then could those who chose, based on their inherent IQ, ability, and interest, go on and
become an auto mechanic or a brain surgeon. But it was a choice, and that is the
difference.
When students are not taught to read fluently by the end of the first grade using phonics
as the method of instruction [which is the only verified, authentic, and vetted means of
teaching children to read], when they don't learn math tables so they can do problems in
their head with understanding instead of with a calculator, when they can't work with
fractions, or decimal points or do long division, how in the world can they go on and
learn Algebra--no matter how many interventions occur or how many "facilitators" get in
their way, or how many cutesy math games they play or how many years they are enrolled in
it?
If you REALLY want to fix our educational system (and I've grown suspicious of your ilk as
I don't think you REALLY want to fix it), then get rid of all the fly by night programs,
vendors, silly antics propagated by college schools of education and ninny college level
and local administrative "educrats" who can't cut it in any other field, and go back to
public education as it was in 1965. That's about the last year it was doing what it was
supposed to do.
Until then, stop badgering all of us with your pseudo fixes that will not work.
Mary McGarr
Katy ISD School Board Trustee
1991-1996
In my opinion, the Texas Association of Business is just a front for Texas Chambers of Commerce, which have moved into every school district with the clear intent of making certain that their members are able to feed at the public tax trough and of meddling with the curriculum --the National Chamber of Commerce supports the Obama Common Core curriculum, and while local Chambers deny allegiance to or association with the National organization, I just have one question. If the local Chamber of Commerce has no association with the national Chamber, why do they use their name and trade on it? Hmmmm?
The dumbing down effort has been in place for over twenty-five years now, so we are reaping what was sown. The fact that students cannot graduate from college would seem to me to be a clear and direct result of these businesses' efforts in the 1980's and 1990's.