By Lt Col Mike Uecker, USAF ret, USAFA ’71
STARRS Ambassador, Ohio State Leader
Mike Uecker School Vouchers Testimony, 22 March 2023:
Chair Richardson, Ranking Member Isaacsohn, and Honorable Members of the Ohio House Finance Subcommittee on Primary and Secondary Education, thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on school choice in House Bill 33.
My name is Mike Uecker, and I am a US Air Force retiree, living in Greene County near Fairborn, Ohio. I am the oldest of 7 children, and neither of my parents earned more than a high school diploma. All of us attended parochial schools and all of us have earned college degrees. I was able to graduate from the Air Force Academy and served 20 years on active duty. I just completed 11 years as a member of two school boards – Fairborn City Schools and the Greene County Career Center.
My education and experience gives me a different perspective than most of my associates in Ohio Public Education.
Excellence is what has kept the United States free as it competes with other countries and other ideologies in a world with a vast history of Nations and empires that have fallen by the wayside.
In the majority of cases, their downfall was caused mainly by corruption and incompetence in government.
For those who think we have progressed beyond that, I strongly advise that you look to history as it will reveal that there has been little to no change in Human Nature in 5000 years.
How does this relate to the Education Bills currently under consideration in the General Assembly?
I submit that competition is key, whether you are talking about weapons systems, commercial products, or education.
We won the Cold War because we had the best weapons and best trained armed forces led by the best-qualified leaders. While I served, I strongly believed that our armed forces were most interested in three characteristics in their leaders: competency, moral courage, and character.
One of the worst things that happened to our military was that after we won the Cold War, it was decided that we could relax and turn our attention inward.
In 1991, we were still so effective against Iraq’s military that President George H.W. Bush stopped the rout out of a sense of mercy. Twenty years later, in 2021, we suffered a stunning defeat in our withdrawal from Afghanistan, losing 13 soldiers and billions of dollars of military hardware to a small rebel force.
Back in the Cold War days, America had one of the best education systems in the world – now, despite spending ever more on public schools, especially administrative overhead and technology, we are not even in the top 25 in math or in the top 10 in English and reading.
I could go on with other examples, for instance, American cars in the 1970’s, but the point is that competition makes for a better product and better value.
Competition gives the victory to the most competent, most innovative and best led.
Competition incentivizes organizations to make the changes necessary to build or rebuild its customer base and gain market share.
Right now, there is no effective competition in education.
After paying property and payroll taxes, working families find it difficult to pony up $5,000+ dollars for tuition for a K-8 parochial school or even more for a private school. High school tuition is more than double that.
And public-school stakeholders know and leverage this to ensure their own objectives are met and their power is never threatened.
These stakeholders complain that vouchers will hurt the public schools, despite the fact that not a penny of the local taxes will go to the voucher parents, so all of the local tax money will be divided up among fewer students if parents choose to take their children out of the public school system.
We have gone from a school system where every student started the day saying the Pledge of Allegiance and saying a prayer to today where we find pornographic content in the school libraries, and where teachers expose children to sexual content and even sex changes starting in kindergarten. These are topics that should be addressed by parents when they feel their children are emotionally mature enough to understand and when it is appropriate. By allowing parents to choose the most appropriate schools for their children, we would be supporting family values.
Regardless of how we got here, this is where we are.
And we must improve education or our nation will join other great nations as a footnote in a history book.
Why Vouchers?
Because without tuition assistance through vouchers, most parents cannot afford to send their children to the schools that will provide a better learning environment for each child.
Because without competition, there is no incentive for the schools to get back to rigorously teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Nor will students really learn the reasons that millions of people from all over the world wish to migrate to the US, while not nearly as many Americans wish to leave.
Our current system actually hurts the poor the most as they are the least able to pay for alternatives that would prepare their children to succeed.
We cannot continue our current system which works for the education establishment and some wealthy school districts but utterly fails too many of the children.
If you really care about ending ignorance and poverty, especially among minorities and disadvantaged groups, competition is the only way.
And we can only have competition if we give our education tax dollars to the parents, not the government institutions.
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