State lawmakers are touting historic education spending levels, but Oklahoma’s per-pupil spending rate is still dead last among surrounding states.
New state-by-state comparisons show that recent investments have boosted Oklahoma’s spending to about $12,519 per student, with additional increases expected for Fiscal Year 2027 from $232 million in new education funding in the new state budget.
But when you rank 49th out of 51, playing catch-up is an astronomically expensive proposition.
While Oklahoma has increased per-pupil spending by about $1,100, neighboring states have made similar hikes.
That means Oklahoma is still about $1 billion short of meeting the regional average spending rate of $14,975 per student, and only Idaho and Utah spent less per student than Oklahoma, according to annual data reported by the federal National Center for Education Statistics at the end of April.
The average Oklahoma public school teacher will earn an estimated $62,055 in gross pay and benefits in 2025-26, ranking 41st in the nation, according to the newly released Rankings and Estimates report by the National Education Association, the most comprehensive comparison available.
That lags behind the regional average of $66,152 by about $4,100.
Oklahoma Speaker of the House Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, recently hailed a new historical high in state public school funding.
“This is not an opinion. It is an undeniable fact,” Hilbert posted on Facebook in late April. “Next year the budget for common education in Oklahoma will increase by over 225 million, setting a new record for the 9th time in 11 years.”
One of the state’s most influential public education advocacy groups said Hilbert’s statement is correct – and cause for celebration.
“They talk about it being almost half the budget, but that is a byproduct of how our state was founded,” said Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association. “It does put more pressure on lawmakers. Most of the states in our region have far more local, dedicated revenue sources to cover costs. According to NCES, we are now (spending) within $700 dollars per student than Texas, so we are making up some ground. My message to our members is, ‘Tell them thank you for what they’ve done starting with the 2018 session.’”
Catching up and Balancing Budgets
The recently passed $12.8 billion state budget for Fiscal Year 2027 includes $2,000 raises for classroom teachers and millions of new dollars for line items aimed at improving students' literacy and math results.
While per-pupil spending doesn’t necessarily determine academic outcomes, it is still worth tracking because Oklahoma’s constitution made public schools here more reliant on state funding than many surrounding states.
That makes it a key indicator of educational equity and of the basic resources available to schools that receive state aid to hire qualified teachers and determine class sizes.
Why Oklahoma lags behind almost all other states in this category is not well understood, even at the Capitol.
“I was wondering the same thing!” said State Sen. Dave Rader, R-Tulsa, a member of the Senate appropriations and education committees and chair of the revenue and taxation committee. “What’s going on? How can we always be dinged on this?”
Rader said he recently worked with state senate research staffers to compare common education spending between 2005, the last time Democrats had control of all three branches of state government, and 2025.
All calculated in 2025 dollars, they found $5,443 per student was spent in 2005 for 629,000 students, and $5,801 per student was spent in 2025 for 687,000 students.
“We grew in numbers and dollars per student, so that’s a huge investment,” said Rader.
Hime previously worked as the superintendent at Enid Public Schools and assistant state superintendent of finance at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, so he has managed annual education budgets at both the local and state levels.
“That $700 difference between Oklahoma and Texas is $14,000 per classroom if you have 20 kids,” he said. “So, it’s just hard when we started being behind basically forever. The last few years, the legislature has sprinkled in more operational dollars, but this year (referring to FY27), zero operational dollars were added in there.”
Just one example of skyrocketing operational costs for Oklahoma public schools is property and casualty insurance, which went from $53.5 million in FY20 to $164.5 million in FY25, according to the state’s Oklahoma Cost Accounting System transparency website.
Hime said at the top of teachers’ and administrators’ wish lists are strategic investments to boost starting teacher pay, which last year lagged behind the regional average by $6,000. They also want more to cover operational costs, including rising utility and insurance expenses, and new funding for what educators call school-based wraparound services for students.
“In most of our schools, teachers have to do multiple jobs; they’re handing out medicine, they’re handling discipline,” Hime said. “More nurses, and more counselors and deans of students who can come in and can take that student having an issue out of the classroom and address what’s going on are the things that would be most meaningful to add.”
Trish Williams, chief financial officer at Union Public Schools in Tulsa, is getting ready to retire at the end of June after balancing school district budgets year in and year out for nearly three decades.
She said what many outsiders don’t understand is that when per-pupil spending doesn’t keep pace with rising operational costs, school districts have to make budget cuts.
“We have to run buses, we have to keep the lights on, we have to clean the classrooms,” Williams said. “Instead of looking at our budget each year and launching new programs or taking on new initiatives for kids, we are consistently put in the position to find areas where we have to cut back in order to maintain operations – because the prices of everything have gone up. If we consistently underspend, as we have for many years in Oklahoma, it does become harder and harder to catch up.”
One new category Williams is trying to balance out in Union’s new budget is certified employee pay.
The $2,000 pay raise legislators just approved for classroom teachers for FY27 doesn’t appear to apply to about 150 of Union’s 1,000 certified employees. Because state law requires that they be paid according to the certified school employee pay scale, local school districts are on the hook to make up the $2,000 difference for those school-based employees, such as counselors and librarians.
“It’s never been done that way in the 28 years I’ve been a school district CFO in Oklahoma,” she said. “I suspect it was to get the total cost (of the raise) down. Something that is of special concern to me right now is the lack of a cohesive, articulated plan for long-term improvement in schools.”
To hear Rader explain it, lawmakers are closely tracking how Oklahoma teacher pay compares to surrounding states.
He found one comparison, showing Oklahoma trails only New Mexico in the region when teacher salaries are adjusted for cost of living, very valuable this session.
“You gotta start somewhere,” he said. “What goes through my mind is it’s a free-market decision. We have to have competitive wages to have good people. If we have taxpayers paying taxes, expect good governance, then we have to have good teachers.”
This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.