Oklahoma public schools would be required to prominently report the share of education funds going to instruction under a bill approved by the House Common Education Committee.

“If we’re okay with whatever our schools decide to spend on instruction, we should be okay with letting people know that,” said state Rep. Chad Caldwell, R-Enid. “If we don’t have a problem with spending 53 percent or 40 percent in the classroom, we shouldn’t be trying to hide that.”

House Bill 3711, by Caldwell, requires Oklahoma public-school districts to “provide the percentage of total district expenditures that were allocated to instructional expenses in the last fiscal year on the home page” of the school’s website. The share of funds going to instructional expenses would also be posted with bond-proposal information.

The bill defines “instructional expenditures” to align with the definition used by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal entity within the United States Department of Education that provides apples-to-apples comparisons of school spending in all 50 states.

According to NCES data for the 2022-2023 school year, 53.3 percent of Oklahoma school funding went to instruction, on average. The national average was 58.8 percent.

Data released by Caldwell in 2025 showed that less than half of school funding went to instruction in roughly 150 of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts.

Total Oklahoma public-school revenue from all sources—local, state, and federal—has surged more than $3 billion since 2018, rising from $6.3 billion to $9.5 billion, excluding cash forward and other savings.

However, the extra money has largely gone for expenses other than direct instruction.

Between the 2018-2019 school year and the 2024-2025 school year, staff numbers at Oklahoma public schools increased from 86,709 to 92,979. Of the 6,270 additional school employees hired during that time, 602 were teachers, or less than 10 percent, according to WANDA, a database maintained by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Even as funding has surged, Oklahoma’s academic outcomes have steadily declined and are now among the worst in the nation according to several widely used measures, including ACT scores and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered in all 50 states.

However, some officials objected to any mandate to prominently post a school’s instructional spending data.

State Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, D-Oklahoma City, said many parents prefer for schools to spend less on instruction and more on other things.

“Sometimes a district may prioritize feeding kids, saying we’re going to cover school lunches, and that goes towards administrative fees, even though that’s the mission of the school and what they want to do, and parents are excited about that,” Pogemiller said.

If a school district’s spending aligns with parents’ wishes, Caldwell responded, those parents will not object to public reporting on the share of funds going to instruction.

“If a school is listening to their constituents and their constituents are saying, ‘We want breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided by the school, we want all these programs, we want all these things,’ whatever, I would agree with you: That’s going to lower their instructional expenditures,” Caldwell said. “But the families, according to your theory, requested that, and that’s going to be reflected in the amount. This is a pretty straightforward thing.”

HB 3711 passed the House Common Education Committee on a 7-4 vote. The bill now proceeds to the House Education Oversight Committee.

[State Rep. Chad Caldwell is pictured above in a House Appropriations & Budget Education Subcommittee meeting on February 10, 2025. Photo credit: Oklahoma House of Representatives]