Steve Nuzum provides a closer look at one of the companies managing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through taxpayer-funded school vouchers.
ClassWallet, which bills itself as “Powering Based Educational Opportunity for Public and Private School Students,” is based in Florida. The company is the largest player in the educational funding management game.
According to a 2025 investigation by ProPublica,
[ClassWallet’s] founder, Jamie Rosenberg, initially offered its online procurement technology to teachers and administrators to reduce the amount of paperwork involved in school expenditures. But the company has shifted to capitalize on the school-choice market. With backers including Lazard Family Office Partners, a global investment firm, ClassWallet has more than 200 employees and contracts in more than 10 states, among them Florida and Arizona, the latter of which has faced headlines about some parents using state education aid for questionable purchases as the cost of its program has swelled far beyond projections.
According to the same piece, ClassWallet is the largest of four major private companies competing for the business of managing states’ tax-funded education programs, including in the growing fields of “educational savings accounts” and other forms of neo-vouchers.
Based on the company’s press releases, states including Ohio, Indiana, Idaho, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Washington, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas, Idaho, and Utah, have all contracted with the ClassWallet in recent years. These contracts generally cover the administration of federal and/ or state education funds for school voucher programs, and federal pandemic relief funds used for education.
During the pandemic, the last category sometimes constituted a way for states to implement kind of backdoor or pilot voucher program, sometimes outside of the bounds of state constitutions and without public input.
In states like South Carolina and Oklahoma, for example, officials created (or, in South Carolina’s case, attempted to create) “GEER” (Governor’s Emergency Education Relief) programs that used federal emergency funds to provide voucher-like grants for students to access private educational services. In South Carolina, the state Supreme Court found this attempt was a violation of the state constitution’s clear prohibition against using state funding for private schools. (South Carolina would go on to pass a voucher law, only to see that law also struck down by the state Supreme Court; legislators responded by packing the Court, trying again, and— so far, at least— successfully passing a second voucher law.)