ustxtxb_obs_1958_03_21_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

AUSTIN The second report of the Texas state tax study commission, prepared by the privately-financed Texas Research League, states that Texans’ per capita state-local tax bill is below the 48-state average by 18 percent. In terms of personal income, Texas-local taxes are six percent below the U. S. average. The state per capita tax bill has Free License Plates for 325,000 Texans Houston Mfgr. Ready To Spend $5,000,000 For 1958 License Tags AUSTINA Houston manufacturer today offered to pay for the 1958 license plates of several hundred thousand Texans. This offer may cost the Childers Manufacturing Co. as much as $5,000,000 during the next 60 days. CHILDERS is a manufacturer of metal building products. They have developed a plan for business firms with employee parking areas. This plan gives executives and all other employees daytime protection for the cars they drive to work. The Childers Daytime Car Protection Plan permits an employer to modernize his employee parking area with reserved, personalized carports for all executives and employees who want them. EMPLOYEES GLADLY pay the few cents a day cost for their own individual carports. The employer purchases or leases the carports. The small employee payment less than coffee moneycovers the full cost of the carports. It even covers administrative costs and a generous return on the employer’s investment. Almost everyone who drives a car to work wants a protected, assigned space for his car instead of leaving it exposed all day to damaging sun, rain and air-borne chemicals. A SPOKESMAN for Childers made this announcement here today: “We want every executive and every employee who values his car and his comfort to have Childers Daytime Car Protection right now. “Every car owner who signs up for a reserved, personalized carport any time from today until May 1 will get his 1958 license plate paid for by Childers. It doesn’t matter if he drives a Cadillac and the license costs $30.25 or a Volkswagen with a license cost of only $8.32. “If a car owner has already bought his 1958 plates, that’s OK with .us. We’ll reimburse him. We want 325,000 car owners to take advantage of this offer before May 1. We’ll gladly pay out $5,000,000 or more.” EXECUTIVES AND EMPLOY-EES who want daytime protection for their carsespecially this summer when the thermometer climbs to 106 degreesshould act now without delay. Childers will pay for their 1958 license plates. Write or phone Childers Manuturing Co., 3620 W. 11th St., Houston 8, Texas. Phone UNderwood 9-3441. \(Adv. Tax League Points Churchmen Take Stands increased 23.4 percent since 1953, it is also reported. As a percentage of income, this was a 13.4 percent increase, compared to the national 9.9 percent. The report said Texas has a “very low sales tax burden \(42 states higher, 1 identidal, 4 Texas ranks 36th in per capita state and local taxes paid, the report said further. Alone among its neighbors and the six largest states, Texas is not using either general sales or income taxation, it was remarked. “It appears the importance of severance taxation in Texas has made it possible for this state to avoid sales and income taxes,” said the report of Texas. The commission-league’s first report showed that 41 percent of all state tax revenue comes from selective sales taxes; another ten percent comes from taxes on motor vehicles. Controversy, Please DALLAS A student public-issues committee has decided it would like to hear some controversial speakers at Southern Methodist University. “We are at liberty to ask anyone we please,” said Patricia Carr, a political science major at S1V1U. The students have invited John Gates, ex-editor of the New York Daily Worker who recently quit the Communist Party, and Mikhailovich Menshikov, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Gates has accepted; Menshikov has not yet responded. DALLAS The Texas Council of Churches representing twelve Protestant denominations which have 1,200,000 membershas called for the repeal of the legislature’s NAACP registration bill, for an end to segregation in churches, and for support of the President’s foreign aid program by “all Christian citizens.” These startlingly specific resolutions were adopted by the fifth assembly of the council here: LL … there should be no discrimination or segregation in the Churchthe worshipping fellowship of Christianson the ground of color, nationality, or any other human division. The Church is the Body of Christ; and in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor serf, male nor female. Jesus Christ became one with us, and He has made all who acknowledge Him as Lord and Saviour, one in Himself. As members of Christian congregations and denominations. we cannot be fully effective witnesses to the truth that Christ has broken down partitions between men until our fellowship of worship and service is open to all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. We cannot do otherwise than work persistently to eliminate all un-Christian forms of discrimination and to guarantee equal opportunity for education, employment, and the enjoyment of civil rights to all citizens, regardless of their racial, national, or religious origin. This assembly of the Texas Council of Churches is grateful for the effective Christian witness which many churches and individual Christians are bearing in communities disturbed by tension and confusion in connection with the problem of race relations. We join them in urging responsible local community action and obedience to the mandates of the courts of our land. 11 LL … Any attempts by city, county, or state governments to eliminate or suppress any nonsubversive voluntary associations, including those working to bring about peaceful social change through processes supported by the United States Constitution and the laws of the nation, are a menace to … cherished human rights of freedom of peaceable assembly and association and freedom of speech guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution. … “The freedom of one is the freedom of all.” Subject to legal processes in harmony with constitutional guarantees, the privilege of anonymous membership in legal associations is necessary for the exercise of these fundamental human rights recognized and preserved by the Constitution. If registration with the county judge can be required of one legal organization it may be required of all … Despite the vigorous opposition of thinking people within and without our churches, the legislature of Texas passed, and the Governor of this state over the protests of many citizen_s signed into law, House Bill No. 5, aimed directly to threaten essential rights of freedom of lawful asso ciation. Believing that all men and Christians, in particular, are responsible to God and to their country for the defense of these rights: 1.We register our sincere regret that our legislature enacted and our Governor signed this unjustified, unnecessary, and undemocratic bill; 2.We put on record our sincere appreciation to the very large percentage of our legislators who opposed the enactment of this bill; 3.We commend our Texas churchmen for courageous opposition given to its enactment: 4.We express our concern that the stigma it places upon our state may be removed by its repeal. 71 Li While the Word of God states very clearly that “man does not live by bread alone,” it certainly makes no attempt to advise men to live without bread. During the 13 years since the end of the second world war literally millions of despondent, disfranchised, disturbed, dislocated, disheartened men, women, and children have found new life and hope through the operation of the Mutual Security program of the United States, sometimes mistakenly called “foreign aid.” Therefore, be it resolved by the Fifth Assembly of the Texas Council of Churches … that it is the sense of this Assembly that the Mutual Security Program proposed by the President of the United States presently before Congress merits the support of all Christian citizens. 77 Houston Education ofGifted Children quired. Greater neatness and adherence to form is demanded.” Asst. Supt. Martin said an extensive testing program is now used to select the better students. They are encouraged to engage in out-of-class student societies in their fields. The approach to learning in the special classes “is inspired, rather than assigned.” “Individual initiative in following through on a learning activity is demanded and expected.” Two special classes are being organized for very highly gifted elementary pupils with I.Q. of 140 or more. Only 34 such students had been singled out late last year. Reviewing what other cities are doing for gifted children, Martin said that such children: Take high school courses for credit in the eighth grade, in Milwaukee; compete for scholarships of $400 to start them out in college, in Philadelphia; finish threeyear junior school in two years, in St. Louis; attend special schools for the gifted, in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and New York; attend special schools in music, math, or science, in New York; cover four years of math in three, then take calculus, analytic, or other advanced math in the fourth year, in Newark; take college math in senior high, in Kansas City, or senior high courses in the ninth grade, in Long Beach, Cal. How are the bright ones chosen for the accelerated training? This is a point of controversy in every school system which tries ability grouping. In Houston, the basis generally is a weighting among these factors: IQ as shown by tests, quality of participation in claswork, and promising leadership in activities. When ability grouping was tried in Houston junior schools between 1926 and 1941, some felt it was unfair to the slow learner, who would benefit from studying alongside the gifted children. With homogeneous grouping, on the other hand, slower pupils can be kept in smaller groups and given more individual attention; those in the upper groups can move past minimum essentials to additional more challenging work. Do students in the special classes find themselves disliked by their fellow students? On a questionnaire among the rapid learners in the seventh and eighth grades at Pershing junior high, 90.3 percent answered no. Were other students “less friendly” to them? No, said 96.5 percent. Board member W. W. Kemmerer expressed concern last September about the social maladjustments a child among older children suffers. He warned that giving gifted children “all the learning they can absorb” in upper senior high would make them equal to the average college sophomore by the time they were ready for college. “They would be misfits,” he said. In November the board decided to consider raising the salaries of teachers of the abler student groups. The acting superintendent was told to study the feasibility of using ability grouping again as an officially approved method of instruction. Early this year the board decided to let students go to special classes in summer school at their own expense. The ‘Happy Child’ The curriculum shakeup in Houston began almost apolitically in June, 1955, when the board, then ruled by a 4-3 liberal majority, heard a presentation arranged by Mrs. Dyer on the reading program. Mrs. Dyer said that Dr. Alexander Frazier, then in charge of curriculum, agreed with her that a child either learns to read his first three years in school or has a problem the rest of his life; “we should go all out in the first three years in school” to teach reading properly, she concluded. Dr. Petersen remarked that Hughes Tool and Cameron Iron Works in Houston had had to establish their own schools to teach workers “simple arithme; tic”; the president at Rice Institute had said freshman students there had to be taught spelling. Petersen attacked “modern” or “progressive” education. Followers of Dewey, Counts, and others caused a change “toward the direction of politics and socialism” about 1935; Counts once asked, “Dare the educators change the social order,” and answered that they did so dare, said the trustee. Under “the so-called doctrine of the ‘happy child,’ ” Petersen said, “in many instances education has become a matter of pure entertainment.” Under the ” ‘no cornpetition idea,’ ” recognition is denied good students, effort is discouraged, the student is deprived of “any desire to achieve”; “and,” added Petersen, “it’s contrary, I think, to our American way of life.” The idea “that it was bad not to promote a child,” he went on, has led to promotions because of age, size, physical development; this “gives the child something for nothing.” Furthermore, he said, “the cult of wholeness,” the “education of the whole child,” has led to integration of subject matter \(as grammar, reading, and writing into “language arts,” or history, geography, and civics of the matters of substance once taught in the original units. Mrs. Vandervoort, a liberal member, said she is worried mostly about English grammar. “All of the educators who have spoken to me say that the children cannot express themselves; that it is not only a matter of reading, both comprehension and speed, but also that they do not know how to put such words as they know together.” She agreed with Mrs. Dyer and Petersen but wondered why the conservative majority of the two preceding decades in Houston had not done anything about the situation. “Mrs. Vandervoort,” Petersen explained, “we have had very few membersnever a majoritywho felt courageous enough to invade the field of curriculum which has been so tenaciously held all the way along by the educators, by teachers, and associations alike. … We have been referred to continuously as enemies of public