The Michigan experiment

Common Cause Magazine, Spring, 1994 by Peter Overby

Engler's toughest enemy was not the Democrats but the Michigan Education Association (MEA), probably the strongest lobby in Lansing. The teacher union's political action committee pumped $914,000 into Democratic legislative campaigns in 1991 and 1992, outspending the Republicans' most generous PAC almost 7 to 1, according to an analysis by the Detroit Free Press. And when the legislature finished with school reform, it looked as if the MEA had outmaneuvered the governor. His reforms were gutted or gone, leaving him to promise another attempt later this winter.

Not only is the package incredibly complicated -- a legislative summary takes 10 pages -- it actually commits more than $10 billion to replace the previous $9 billion. Voters get to choose their poison in a referendum March 15. Under the Michigan constitution, any sales tax increase requires a referendum, and voters have said no 11 times in the past 15 years, most recently last spring. But this time, if they don't raise the sales tax 50 percent, their income taxes will go up 30 percent.

One key battleground is Oakland County. Despite impoverished Pontiac at its center, Oakland is the wealthiest county in Michigan. The median family income of $50,980 is 39 percent above the state median. With the nation's largest concentration of robotics firms, Kmart's national headquarters and, as one county official says, "the brains of the auto industry," including the Chrysler technology center and General Motors proving ground, Oakland leads the Detroit area in producing new jobs. The county is a must-win for the GOP, but its voters are not Engler-style Republicans. Although Engler carried Oakland in 1990, his winning margin was smaller than George Bush's two years later.

The defects of the school finance package become clear in Oakland, where Pontiac spends $4,761 per pupil and nearby Bloomfield Hills spends $10,358, the second highest per-pupil level in the state. Bloomfield Hills students can get five years of Spanish in elementary school, environmental instruction on the schools' farm and an interdisciplinary education at an experimental high school.

Next year spending will go up 4.7 percent in Pontiac, 1.5 percent in Bloomfield Hills. But a cap on local property taxes will prevent top-spending districts from fully compensating for the tax cuts or keeping up with inflation, so Bloomfield Hills may eventually lose many of its most advanced programs. "The net effect is that we are essentially capped where we are now forever," Bloomfield Hills schools Superintendent Robert Docking says unhappily.

The tax side has more bad news. With its strong tax base, Bloomfield Hills kept property tax rates low, so the bills won't go down much. But income or sales taxes will go up substantially.

As usual with Engler, passions run high over school financing. The infighting goes like this: If the Mackinac Center were giving Engler a report card (as it did in 1992 and 1993), Reed says the schools package "would knock him down a full letter grade" from A to B. That's just a ploy, scoffs Michigan Democratic spokesperson Steve Gools: "The Mackinac Center moves John Engler to the center when they [are] critical of him."