Next month’s gubernatorial election presents a stark choice for Michigan voters. While Rick Snyder deserves credit for discussing the importance of public education, it’s clear that Virg Bernero is the only candidate with a record of supporting higher education. Mayor Bernero, the husband of a school principal, understands that “education is economic development” and that to Michigan’s education system has to improve for our economy to recover. He has a detailed plan for improving education from preschool to college graduation.

Bernero’s plan would place all 4 year olds in preschool by 2020 and move Michigan towards all-day kindergarten because he knows that early-childhood education lays the foundation for a successful life. Study after study has shown students who receive early childhood education end up more educated, wealthier and less likely to be incarcerated. Bernero’s plan would stop cuts in the length of the school year and launch an all out attack on Michigan’s unacceptably high drop-out rate ensuring that our students are prepared to compete with students from other states and countries.

Closest to home for those of us in Ann Arbor, it would adequately fund higher education, and restore the Michigan Promise, For students who don’t go on to universities it would invest in vocation and technical education so that they leave high-school prepared to compete in the twenty-first century economy. While Bernero has a detailed plan, his opponent, Rick Snyder, offers no specifics on reforming Michigan’s educational system. Like Bernero, Snyder acknowledges that we must educate our way to prosperity, but he talks only of ways to make schools cheaper.

No one opposes making school spending more efficient - service consolidation is part of Bernero’s educational plan as well -- but efficiency, a nice way of saying budget cuts, cannot be the basis of a plan to seriously tackle the educational problems prevent our state from being competitive.

Snyder has reasonable proposals for eliminating waste, but his plan also includes cutting salaries for teachers, who already make less than comparably educated private-sector employees, and, perhaps most destructively, getting the government out of early-childhood education (perhaps he would have joined Tim Walberg as a second vote against authorizing Head Start).

Because his campaign has been so vague, voters can don’t know what else Snyder might look to cut. Sports? Music? Extracurricular? If Snyder’s plan for Michigan offered more specifics we could answer with confidence. As it is, we can’t. With a choice between a proven advocacy for public education on the one hand, and uncertainty on the other, Michigan voters can’t afford to take a chance. Supporters of education should vote for Virg Bernero on Nov. 2. Zachary Martin Chair Committee on Education College Democrats at the University of Michigan