In recent years, per-student revenue and staffing levels at Oklahoma public schools have increased, but academic outcomes have continued to decline. The results of the 2025 ACT test, administered to high-school students preparing to enter college, provide the latest example.

In 2025, Oklahoma students achieved an average composite score of 17.5 on the ACT test, well below the national average of 19.4. A 36 is a perfect score on the ACT.

Only one state had a lower average composite score. However, less than half of students take the ACT in most states, while 100 percent of Oklahoma students take the test, meaning state-to-state comparisons are not always apples-to-apples.

But even when comparing Oklahoma only to the 14 other states where 90 percent or more students took the ACT, Oklahoma still ranked at the very bottom. Once again, only one state had a lower composite score.

For academic outcomes to decline so significantly and steadily, even as funding has surged along with school staffing levels, defies the predictions made by teacher union officials and their allies when they shut down state schools for weeks in 2018 to force passage of tax increases for schools.

“More spending and more staff shouldn’t result in lower outcomes. Yet that is exactly what we are seeing in Oklahoma,” said state Rep. Chad Caldwell, an Enid Republican who chairs the House Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee. “ACT scores continue to decline even as education budgets and staffing levels grow, much of it outside the classroom. That tells us the problem is not how much we spend, but how we spend it. We need to refocus on what actually drives student success: strong classrooms, meaningful support for teachers, and accountability systems that measure real outcomes.”

This year’s poor ACT results continue a trend of steady decline that began with the tenure of former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister, who first took office in 2015. Prior to that time, the composite ACT score of Oklahoma students may not have been rising, but it was stable.

Oklahoma students achieved an average composite score of 20.4 in Hofmeister’s first year in office in 2015. Results steadily declined throughout her tenure. By the end of Hofmeister’s second term in 2022, Oklahoma’s ACT average had fallen to 17.9. The decline continued under Hofmeister’s successor, former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, who resigned mid-term in 2025. In 2023, Oklahoma’s composite score fell to 17.8 and then to 17.6 in 2024 before hitting 17.5 in 2025.

Only 17 percent of Oklahoma seniors met at least three of the four ACT benchmarks on the 2025 test compared to a national average of 30 percent.

Just 15 percent of Oklahoma students met the benchmark for math, and 17 percent met the science benchmark on the 2025 test. Only 28 percent of Oklahoma seniors met the benchmark in reading, and 40 percent met the benchmark in English.

In Utah, which spends less per student than Oklahoma, 34 percent of students met at least three benchmarks, double the rate in Oklahoma. In math, 32 percent of Utah students met the benchmark, more than twice the rate in Oklahoma, while 33 percent of Utah students met the benchmark for science.

The share of students taking the ACT in Utah was comparable to Oklahoma, with 91 percent of Utah seniors taking the test compared to 100 percent of students in Oklahoma.

Since the 2017-2018 school year, which ended with the teacher walkout and passage of massive tax increases for education, revenue has exploded in Oklahoma schools.

According to financial data reported by schools to the state’s Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS), new revenue in Oklahoma public schools reached $9,600,703,488 in the 2023-2024 school year. Since student enrollment was 698,923 at that time, that comes out to an average of $13,736 per student.

That means per-student revenue has increased by 51 percent since the 2017-2018 school year, when Oklahoma public schools reported having $6,300,400,107 in new revenue and statewide enrollment of 694,816, for an average of $9,067 per student.

The average per-student revenue in Oklahoma public schools is now significantly more than the average private-school tuition in Oklahoma, according to figures compiled by Private School Review.

School Staffing Surge

Much of the increased funding has been used to hire additional staff in Oklahoma’s public schools.

According to the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, the number of employees in Oklahoma public schools rose 11.2 percent between the 2017-2018 school year and the 2024-2025 school year, increasing from 83,744 employees to 93,146.

In contrast, Oklahoma’s public-school student enrollment increased by less than four-tenths of one percent during that time, rising from 694,816 to 697,358.

For every one student added to total enrollment in those years, Oklahoma schools added 3.6 additional staff members.

So why has a massive increase in funding and staff not generated improved outcomes in Oklahoma schools?

One possible answer is that much of the extra money is being spent on non-teaching staff.

The State Leadership 2025 Index, produced by the State Leadership Initiative, found that teachers represent less than 48 percent of staff at Oklahoma’s K-12 schools. The report showed that 30 states’ K-12 workforces included a higher share of teachers.

Similarly, information compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics report for the 2022-2023 school year (the most recent for which full data are available) showed that only 53.3 percent of Oklahoma school funding went to instruction, on average.

That was substantially less than the national average of 58.8 percent.

And many Oklahoma schools spend an even smaller share of their budgets on instruction.

Less than half of school funding goes to instruction in roughly 150 of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts, according to state records.

Lawmakers took a stab at addressing that problem in the 2025 legislative session.

House Bill 1280, by Caldwell, would have required that at least 50 percent of a school district’s annual budget go to “instructional expenditures” starting in the 2025-2026 school year.

But the Oklahoma State School Boards Association, a lobbyist group funded with schools’ tax dollars, opposed the bill. The legislation failed on a 36-57 vote in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

State Sen. Adam Pugh, an Edmond Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said the goal of any future changes made to the K-12 system must be to produce high-school graduates who will succeed when they ultimately enter the workforce.

“The ACT is a snapshot, not a crystal ball, and it’s not always an accurate predictor of a student’s future success, especially for those pursuing trades, technical education, or immediate entry into the workforce,” Pugh said. “To improve outcomes, we need to look at education more holistically, ensuring students are on the right pathway, whether that’s college, career tech, or the workforce. We must ensure our accountability measures reflect those different paths. Success shouldn’t be defined by a single test score, but by whether students graduate prepared for what comes next.”

House lawmakers are focused on addressing structural problems in Oklahoma’s public-school system, particularly in the area of reading. According to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, only 23 percent of Oklahoma fourth-grade students were proficient or advanced in reading in 2024. That was one of the worst rates in the nation.

“In the upcoming session, the House will focus on the core components every student needs to succeed, with a particular emphasis on literacy,” Caldwell said. “We should not be surprised that repeating the same failed policies year after year has produced the same disappointing results. Every year without progress is another cohort of students moving through a system that too often falls short of what they deserve.”