DALLAS, TX & SANTA FE, NM  (Dallas Morning News) October 14, 2010 ―  There was a time when groups like the Dallas Regional Chamber would beat the bushes and arrange a basket of incentives to lure companies to move their operations to North Texas.

The approach often worked, but it also created bidding wars for low-skills jobs that would move to the next cheapest place to do business at the drop of a hat; North Texas can't build a sustainable 21st-century economy on the shifting sands of low-wage jobs.

In a five-year blueprint released Friday, the Dallas Regional Chamber has wisely recognized North Texas has to step up to this challenge or risk falling behind in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

The chamber's plan focuses on attracting companies in skilled growth industries, such as technology and health care.

Most impressive: It makes it clear the region can't prosper unless K-12 education improves and the chamber is ready to take on this issue.

We applaud the chamber's sense of urgency to prod North Texas businesses to step out of their corporate silos and make educational excellence an economic development priority.

The future of southern Dallas and the future of all North Texas communities are linked by the quality of the workforce their local schools produce. Within Dallas public schools, for example, dropout rates among African-American and Hispanic students are shockingly high.

Businesses can't stay on the sidelines; they must be engaged in shaping the direction of education.

The chamber's goals are realistic and achievable. By 2015, the chamber wants high school graduation rates within DISD to improve from 67 percent to 80 percent, and the percentage of Dallas residents with advanced degrees to climb from 10 percent to 15 percent. And to hold everyone accountable for pulling in the same direction, the chamber also plans to regularly ask North Texas businesses to measure their satisfaction with the caliber of employees from local schools.

The chamber's education thrust also supports its other five-year goals, which are to add more jobs than any other region, significantly increase venture capital investments and make North Texas among the nation's five largest contributors to the nation's gross domestic product. Despite current economic strains, North Texas already is the sixth-largest contributor to GDP behind New York, Los Angeles , Chicago, Houston and Washington, D.C., and is one of the few regions to show a modest pickup in new jobs in these tough times.

About 70 percent of North Texas' economic output comes from Denton, Collin and Dallas counties, which means this region can't afford to sit back and expect economic opportunities to blossom locally without planting more seeds of excellence in the classroom.

We hope the chamber's efforts will build support for educating a productive workforce, as well as for innovative policies to assure more students graduate with marketable skills or the knowledge to pursue college degrees.

Also, we hope the chamber's thrust will provide greater impetus to create a Tier One research university in North Texas and encourage additional investments in K-12 and institutions of higher education. A region is only as prosperous as the talents and skills of the next generation.