Ohio gives parents taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools. But those schools still get to cherry-pick which children they accept.
That contradiction sits at the center of an Ohio appeals court ruling that declared the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional on Oct. 15. The Tenth District Court of Appeals upheld a June 2025 lower-court decision, finding that the program uses public money to secure “a separate system of non-public schools” at the expense of public education.
For families using the vouchers, nothing changes immediately. The ruling is on hold pending an appeal, and Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson said the program would continue uninterrupted as the state asks the Ohio Supreme Court to review the case.
How EdChoice went from a rescue program to universal vouchers
Created in 2005 and launched the following year, EdChoice was originally designed to help children assigned to chronically underperforming public schools attend private schools using state-funded tuition assistance.
In 2013, lawmakers created EdChoice Expansion, initially allowing kindergarten students whose family income was at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines to qualify, regardless of how their local public schools performed. Eligibility was then extended one grade at a time.
Then, in 2023, Republican lawmakers removed the income limit altogether, making EdChoice Expansion available to families regardless of income. Families earning up to 450% of the federal poverty guidelines—about $135,000 for a family of four at the time—could receive full scholarships, while those earning more qualified for smaller awards.
The legal fight began in January 2022, when six public school districts, four students and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding sued the state, arguing that EdChoice violated Ohio’s constitutional requirement to maintain a “thorough and efficient system of common schools.”
In June 2025, a Franklin County judge declared EdChoice unconstitutional. The state appealed and lost again this month.
Why the court says public schools pay the price
So what exactly went wrong with a program originally designed to help children escape struggling public schools?
For one, the appeals court found that private schools receiving vouchers retain discretion to decide which students to accept. The judges cited admission policies that allowed private schools to reject students with behavioral problems, disabilities or poor academic performance. Public schools, meanwhile, must continue educating eligible children in their districts, regardless of how expensive their needs may be.
That creates a financial problem. When students leave public schools, districts can lose the state funding tied to those students. But their buildings still need maintenance, school buses still need to run, and teachers still need to be paid. (Some Ohio districts have even cut high school bus service while still busing students to private and charter schools to avoid state penalties.)
The students can leave. The bills don’t necessarily leave with them.
And if private schools enroll children who cost less to educate, public schools may be left with a greater share of students who need more expensive support.
The court also found that families in many rural counties have substantially fewer opportunities to use EdChoice vouchers. Of the 154 private schools where at least three-quarters of students use vouchers, 44% are in just three counties: Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton, home to Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Ohio spent about $776 million on its two EdChoice programs in fiscal 2025—$492.7 million on EdChoice Expansion scholarships and $283.1 million on traditional EdChoice scholarships—covering more than 140,000 students. Meanwhile, the appeals court found that public schools were not receiving all the money the state’s own funding plan called for.
According to the appeals court ruling, Ohio public schools received about $7.1 billion in state funding in fiscal 2024, roughly $700 million less than the $7.8 billion they would have received under the state’s fully funded school-funding formula. That same year, Ohio spent $677.6 million on EdChoice vouchers.
The judges found that EdChoice and public school funding drew from the same line item in the state budget. Aaron Rausch, chief of budget and school funding at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, testified that if the voucher money were no longer going to private schools, the state could direct it back to public schools.
In other words, Ohio was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on private-school tuition while falling short of fully funding its public-school formula.
The state had planned to phase in its school-funding formula over several years, so the $700 million gap can’t simply be blamed on EdChoice. But the court concluded that the phase-in had “by all meaningful measures, been abandoned,” and that voucher spending was competing with money that could otherwise support public schools.
The court also cited a sworn statement detailing the financial problems facing one of the districts that sued.
Marnisha Brown, superintendent of the Richmond Heights Local School District outside Cleveland, said the district couldn’t afford to repair a broken elementary-school boiler and heating pumps, pay competitive teacher salaries or offer programs including band, art, music, drama and foreign languages.
The district also couldn’t win voter approval for a school levy. Those problems don’t prove that EdChoice alone caused its financial difficulties, but they illustrate the strain facing public schools.
Most new voucher users weren’t leaving public schools
And there’s another twist.
You might think a program originally designed to help children escape struggling public schools would mostly benefit students leaving those schools. But among first-time recipients of its expanded version, that wasn’t the case.
Of roughly 25,700 students who received an EdChoice Expansion scholarship for the first time in fiscal 2025, only about 6,100, or 24%, had attended public schools the year before, according to Ohio’s Legislative Service Commission. The other three-quarters weren’t coming from an Ohio public school.
Ohio isn’t just helping children leave struggling public schools. It’s also paying private-school tuition for students who weren’t attending public schools to begin with.
What critics and supporters are saying
Democratic state Sen. Willis E. Blackshear Jr. of Dayton called the ruling “a major step in the right direction,” criticizing the state’s growing spending on private-school scholarships while public districts struggle to cover their costs.
“Ohio students deserve an educational environment that benefits all, not some, and this cannot be a reality as long as we are spending public tax dollars on exclusionary, often for-profit, private schools while our public schools suffer the financial burden,” Blackshear said.
Supporters of EdChoice see the ruling very differently.
Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network, said the decision “represents an egregious example of judicial overreach.”
“Ohio is facing a severe educational crisis, with two-thirds of public school eighth graders failing to achieve reading proficiency and three-quarters falling short in mathematics,” McIntosh said. “The loss of EdChoice would threaten to strip away one of the most effective tools created by elected leaders to reform and improve Ohio’s education system.”
Wilson, the attorney general, also rejected the conclusion that EdChoice harms public education.
“The current system does not hurt our public schools,” he said, arguing that families should be able to decide where to send their children.
Ohio’s case is part of a broader national fight over taxpayer-funded private-school choice. Parents and taxpayers in Tennessee have sued over that state’s $150 million voucher program, while supporters argue that a growing school choice movement offers families a way out of underperforming schools.
For now, the vouchers remain available while Ohio seeks Supreme Court review. Parents can choose where to apply. Private schools still get to choose whom to admit.
