In early May of 2025, oral arguments for the joint lawsuit by over 300 affiliates attached to public education funding made their pitch for why school vouchers harmed them and needed to be made unconstitutional.  Lakota schools in my district have recently joined this lawsuit with some horrendous legal advice from their counsel, but here’s the deal, and it’s quite clear after listening to the plaintive side of the case.  I had friends who went to provide testimony for the defense, for the position of the state to continue with the expansion of the school voucher program, in this case specifically, EdChoice.  I don’t think there was any question going into it how it was going to evolve.  But the position of the presenters, the public school argument, was incredibly weak.  Pathetically weak, and I guess you would expect them to be better prepared.  Here’s the deal: Public schools have left people wanting something better because they have performed terribly over a long period.  And parents want choices for their kids.  We’re not talking about not having education here.  We are talking about better education made that way through competition.  These pathetic public schools run by these ridiculously lazy teacher unions have destroyed the public education prospect as it was initially conceived.  Because most parents need the free babysitting service, they hold their noses and just put up with it.  But increasingly, parents don’t want to send their kids to public schools, and they want access to private schools, so they look for options like EdChoice to do so.  For many parents who currently send their kids to private schools, the system is really unfair to them.  They already pay property taxes to a local school attached to their zip code, and the full tuition for the private alternative.  Now, more people want the same option; they only wish that the tax money they pour into the system would be used to help give them an option instead of wasting it on a poorly managed local school they have no choice in.  Other than picking up and moving somewhere else.  It’s an evil system that is in deep need of reform. 

I’m happy to do it. I usually do it twenty times a week for somebody somewhere, and I’ll give everyone some free legal work in this case.  This is an easy case without much drama because of the wording in the Ohio Constitution, which I think is a remarkable document.  I love the Ohio Constitution.  For fun, I read it at least once a week.  But for the plaintiffs in this EdChoice case, they are way off the rails on their argument.  And for the defense, here is how you win this case with an end zone dance.  The Ohio Constitution from 1851 says, “the General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”  The problem with the teacher union-run public schools with an operating management system straight off the pages of the Democrat Party is that they have let their costs get away from them, and that nobody manages the efficiency of the product they produce, no matter how you manage “efficiency.”  We could measure efficiency by the output, student quality, and ability to navigate adult lives.  Or get jobs that they are well prepared for.  Or we can measure efficiency by the cost per pupil, how much money it takes to produce a good student, “efficiently.”  In all the cases, the public school presentation of their point of view falls short because of the wording, “efficiency.”  They want and expect an exclusive monopoly of state funds, which has caused them to be wildly inefficient.  And it is in this failure that there is a court case at all.  Public schools, six at this Columbus hearing, but a lot more in the background, are trying to stave off what they caused for themselves. 

People want choice from the public school system because it has proven itself to be incredibly inefficient in allocating funds to the proper education of Ohio students.  So the burden of proof in this case is on the plaintiffs to show how they have presented an efficient product worthy of state money, rather than their assumption that they are promised state money just for existing.  They have not met the minimum Constitutional threshold for their base argument.  That’s why the Supreme Court has found the Ohio school funding model unconstitutional up to this point and why it has lingered in indecision.  That word “efficiency” is a real problem for how public education evolved, and the writers were wise to put it there.  You could also say the same about the word “thorough.”  How can public schools say they provide a “thorough” education when the evidence shows that they do only what they have to do to get state money and use it to pay overpriced labor markets ridiculous amounts of money for perpetually poor performance?  The plaintiffs really sounded foolish in this constitutional regard at the Columbus oral arguments.  Even I was embarrassed for them.

I know it, the public school types claim that they are held to different standards than the private schools are not held to, and there is money in that compliance.  But that is again part of the problem of inefficiency, even if government standards have made the public school experience less efficient.  It contributes through their argument of the facts that the public school experience is unreasonably inefficient because of the standards the state has put on them to make the use of the money they get less effective.  Which only makes it worse for them.  This kind of back and forth is why more and more parents want an off-ramp to the public school experience.  Parents wish to choose whether it’s in a private school or to homeschool their kids so they don’t have to send their kids to a factory of Democrat politics, which is what modern education has evolved into.  Public schools are not teaching kids to grow up and become Republicans, which would make sense if it were fair both ways.  But they are actively trying to teach kids to grow up and become Democrats.  And what parent wants to pay for that if they don’t want to lose their kids to radical politics?  Which happens a lot in the public school experience.  And when you go to school board meetings to complain, and the school board cuts off the mic to shut everyone up, what do they expect to happen?  People will want to pull their kids out of those schools and will not want to waste their money on an inefficient school just because it happens to be in their zip code.  The public schools have shown that they waste the money and continue asking for more.  Because they are a bad product made that way through a monopoly status.  And the best thing for them, to make them Constitutionally viable, is to force them to be more efficient in a competitive marketplace, which is why EdChoice and many other voucher programs will increase in number in the years to come.  The teachers’ unions will not win this case, because they can’t show that they contribute an efficient and thorough product.  And with that, the case is over.

Rich Hoffman

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