Ohio is home to five private school scholarship programs. The Jon Peterson Special Needs and Autism Scholarship programs are exclusively available for students with special needs. The Cleveland Scholarship is for students who reside in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. And the remaining two programs, which are collectively known as EdChoice, have much broader eligibility criteria. Together, they offer scholarships to every student in Ohio.
For many Ohioans, these programs are a lifeline. They empower parents to make schooling choices based on what’s best for their children rather than where they can afford to live. They provide an escape hatch for those assigned to a persistently low-performing neighborhood school, or a high-performing one that just isn’t the right fit. Even for families that ultimately end up choosing a district school—and the vast majority do—having options matters.
To truly consider their options, however, families need access to high quality school data. For district and charter schools, state report cards are a handy tool that fulfill that need. But Ohio doesn’t currently have a similar resource for private schools. Many offer information on their websites, but meaningful comparison to other schools can be difficult and time-consuming. Even when parents have the time and energy to spare (which is no small feat), it can be hard to sort through fact and fiction because choice opponents routinely flood the media with misleading claims and inaccurate analyses.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Ohio collects and publishes plenty of crucial data on the private schools that accept state scholarships. Not all of this information is useful to families. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that a family debating between a district, charter, and private high school for their rising ninth grader cares much about administrative cost reimbursements. But there are a few resources that are worthwhile. Let’s take a look at three.
1. Detailed lists of private schools that accept state scholarships
The first important piece of information that school-searching families need is an answer to the question: What’s available near me? To help families discover their options, Ohio provides two interactive tools.
The first is a scholarship dashboard that allows parents to search for options based on the scholarship programs they’re eligible for. The parents of a rising Kindergartener with autism, for example, could select the Autism Scholarship from the dropdown menu and receive a list of every provider in the state that accepts that particular scholarship. Clicking the “proceed” button for a specific provider offers more detailed information, including its physical address, a link to its website, and information about staff (such as certifications and licensure) and offered services (like occupational therapy or speech and language services).
The second is an interactive directory that offers information about every state-approved scholarship provider in Ohio. Parents can filter results by program, county, city, site type, and grade level. The directory also provides an interactive map that allows users to navigate all the way down to the street level, which could be immensely helpful for families with transportation concerns.
2. Test results
Once families are aware of what’s available, academics are often the next big question. In Ohio, students who attend private schools on state-funded scholarships are required by law to take a state-approved assessment in certain grades and subject areas.[1] That includes math and English language arts in grades 3–8, science in grades 5 and 8, and five high school end of course exams. In private schools where 65 percent or more of a school’s total enrollment is scholarship students, the entire student body—not just those enrolled on a scholarship—must take these state-required tests.
The Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) is required to compile and disaggregate results and then post them on its website. To fulfill this requirement, DEW annually updates a scholarship assessment report. This report discloses proficiency rates for scholarship students at the state level, as well as at individual private schools and by students’ home districts. Results can be filtered by school year, type of scholarship, grade band, and student subgroup. The data, however, are not reported in a user-friendly format. Because they are tucked away in hard-to-find databases on the DEW website, it’s hard to believe that many parents have ever looked at these numbers, much less used them to inform their decision-making.
Proficiency rates are important, but they’re not the only academic data point that matters. For years, Ohio has calculated a progress measure for public schools that measures the academic growth students make over the course of a year. This data is crucial, as it showcases a school’s contribution to student learning and provides results that are more neutral in regard to demographics. Unfortunately, Ohioans don’t currently have access to a similar measure for private schools that accept state scholarships. But that’s about to change. As part of the 2023 state budget, lawmakers passed a provision requiring DEW to develop a student growth measure for scholarship students in grades 4–8 and to post the results on its website. Once this measure is in place (which will likely be in 2026), families will have a more complete picture of school quality to use when making enrollment decisions.
3. Visit checklist
When most people think of “school visits,” it’s usually in terms of higher education—students travel to the colleges and universities they’re considering, go on tours, meet current students and staff, and ask plenty of questions. But school visits aren’t exclusive to higher education. Students and families can also visit K–12 schools, including private schools that accept state scholarships.
To help families ask the right questions on these visits, DEW offers a parent visit checklist. It’s not particularly detailed, but that’s a good thing—it’s much easier for parents to keep track of a single sheet of paper, and to compare their notes from multiple schools. Moreover, despite its brevity, the checklist succeeds in identifying several really important areas where parents might need more information. That includes admission requirements, discipline policies, religious expectations, costs (not just tuition but also books, supplies, and uniforms), and what the school offers in terms of transportation, tutoring, before/after care, breakfast and lunch, sports, clubs, and field trips. The checklist also identifies documents that parents should be prepared to provide to schools, including birth certificates, proof of address, and academic records from their child’s prior school.
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Each year, tens of thousands of families in Ohio choose to send their children to private schools using state scholarships. Their reasons for doing so vary. But every family, regardless of why they’re exercising school choice, deserves access to detailed and accurate information about their options. Ohio currently offers some key pieces of information, including interactive lists of schools, state test results, and other helpful resources. But state leaders can and should do more to ensure that families have everything they need to make an informed choice. In a follow-up piece, we’ll explore ways that Ohio can provide more accessible information about private schools.
[1] That test can be, but is not required to be, the state assessment.
