The Michigan Daily and The Michigan Review periodically run a point/counterpoint on issues of the day. This installment discusses Proposal 5 on next month's state ballot.

The Michigan Daily

By Christopher Zbrozek

Michigan, the general consensus goes, needs a better-educated workforce if it is to shake off the economic malaise that has gripped the state in recent years. By guaranteeing funding increases to the state's public schools and universities, the passage of Proposal 5 would do far more for the state's students - and its economic future - than the governor and the state Legislature have seen fit to do in recent years.

Locking in annual inflationary funding increases should never be the first option in financing any function of government. Ideally, a responsible government should be able to ensure there are enough resources available to pay for needed public services like education.

Michigan doesn't have that kind of responsible government now, and it hasn't had one like that for years. Term limits have left the Legislature singularly bereft of experience, allowing ideology to trump sound public policy. Under the current Republican-led Legislature, tax cuts are the policy of choice - no matter what the effect on the state's public schools and universities. Meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm has failed to be a strong advocate for higher education funding.

The result is that education funding has fared poorly in the past few years. K-12 funding hasn't seen drastic cuts because no politician - not even longtime charter-school advocate Dick DeVos - wants to come across as being against public schools. The state's universities, however, have been an easy target. Our public universities saw four straight years of funding cuts until the most recent budget in this election year. Coupled with rising enrollment, those steady cuts caused the state appropriation per public university student to drop more than $1,100 between 2001 and 2005.

The state's universities have filled that gap largely through years of double-digit tuition increases, making higher education inaccessible to many would-be educated workers. K-12 schools have tried to cope with rising health-care and pension costs by cutting programs and increasing class sizes - in short, by cutting into the quality of the education their students receive. These are sorry strategies at a time when the collapse of Michigan's traditional manufacturing base has left the state in desperate need of educated workers able to attract high-tech firms.

Proposal 5 isn't perfect. In particular, a provision that caps the share of retirement costs that districts must pay and shifts the rest to the state government likely will delay needed reforms to retirement costs.

Cutting taxes hasn't done much so far to turn the state's economy around; maybe investing in the education of our future workforce will. The proposal also includes a provision to decrease the funding gap between poor and affluent districts - something any fair-minded person should support.

Michigan's dysfunctional state government has shown all too clearly over the past few years that it isn't committed to providing quality public education of the kind that Michigan residents need if the state's economy is ever to turn around. Proposal 5 may be just the shock state government needs to make sure Michigan students get the education they deserve.

Zbrozek is a Daily editorial page editor.

The Michian Review

By Michael O'Brien

Nary a soul on this enlightened campus would come out against a ballot initiative that consistently increases funding for schools . right? After all, I hear children are our future.

Proposal 5, which will be put to Michigan voters this election day, would shroud bad public policy in the rhetoric of good intentions. Fixing funding for schools to inflation might seem like a good idea on its face, but there are a number of financial and practical drawbacks to such a proposal.

Implicit in the proposal is the red-herring argument that equates funding with academic success. Detroit Public Schools spend almost exactly the same amount per student as Ann Arbor Public Schools, and yet results are disparate. There are far more factors at work in stimulating students' academic success.

This proposal also relieves Michigan schools of any responsibility whatsoever to rein in spending. What incentive would any school district have to curtail expenses when a guaranteed increase is on the horizon?

We would be more receptive to mandatory funding increases if such increases were a golden solution for public schools. But take, for example, Urban Preparatory Academy in Detroit. This central Detroit charter school is on pace to record a 90-percent graduation rate and send 90 percent of its graduates on to college.