During his State of the State address this week, Gov. Kevin Stitt noted that public-school funding has increased during his tenure at a rate undreamed of throughout most of Oklahoma history.

“I believe these last seven years have been the greatest in state history,” Stitt said. “We’ve gone from budget deficits to historic savings. We increased public education funding more in my term as governor than in the past 25 years combined. At the same time, we’ve cut taxes by $1.6 billion and let Oklahomans keep more of their money.”

But House Democratic Leader Cyndi Munson of Oklahoma City quickly argued that Stitt’s claim was fundamentally false.

“He talked about historic investments,” Munson said. “What I want to highlight is those are mostly because of historic cuts.”

Munson claimed that the school-funding increases noted by Stitt are merely the result of backfilling budget holes dug prior to Stitt’s election, a period when an oil-bust recession harmed Oklahoma’s economy and caused state tax collections to decline dramatically.

“Ten years ago yesterday, I joined the Legislature in the state House and we were faced with a $1.5 billion budget deficit,” Munson said. “Massive cuts were made to education, to human services, and to other various core services of government. But education, in particular, got the biggest cuts.”

However, the revenue reports made by Oklahoma public schools paint a different picture.

Instead, those reports show that total funding for public schools dropped only once during the time frame referenced by Munson.

That reduction was roughly half a million dollars. In comparison, total funding for Oklahoma public schools has since increased by more than $3.5 billion, more than offsetting the prior cut.

In the 2015-2016 school year, Oklahoma public schools reported having $6,012,945,264 from all revenue sources (federal, state, and local), excluding carryover savings. That was a decline of $504,956 from the prior year, when schools reported having $6,013,450,220.

Oklahoma public school funding has steadily increased since that time.

In the 2016-2017 school year, districts reported having $6,091,221,469.

In the 2017-2018 school year, public schools reported having $6,300,400,107.

By the 2018-2019 school year, public schools reported having $7,039,859,836.

Total school funding has surged dramatically since then, coinciding with Stitt’s tenure as governor.

In the 2024-2025 school year, the most recent for which full data are available, Oklahoma public schools reported having $9,586,994,906 in revenue from all sources, excluding carryover and similar savings.

Schools’ cash-forward and other savings have also exploded. In the 2024-2025 school year, schools reported having unspent cash carried forward and other savings that totaled $4,530,110,508, compared to $2,123,522,933 in the 2016-2017 school year.

This is not the first time Munson has made claims about Oklahoma’s education system that are contradicted by official records.

In an April 23, 2025, press release, Munson declared, “We rank 49th in the nation for public education and last in the region for teacher pay and per-student spending.”

Munson’s release did not cite a source for her teacher-pay claim, and it was contradicted even by left-wing sources.

A report issued in April 2025 by NEA Research showed that Oklahoma’s average teacher salary in 2023-2024 was $61,330, which was higher than the average in three of the six states that border Oklahoma, not last in the region.

This month, officials with the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) also rebutted that claim.

According to OSDE, Oklahoma’s average teacher pay of $61,330 ranks in the middle of the seven-state region based on the raw dollar figure. After officials adjusted states’ teacher pay for cost-of-living differences, Oklahoma offered the second-highest average teacher pay in the region based on its actual buying power.