Education

Report ranks Oklahoma 50th in education, warns money no cure-all

August 20, 2025

Ray Carter

A recent report released by WalletHub, a personal finance company, ranked Oklahoma’s public-school system 50th nationwide out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

While that ranking was based on 32 metrics that included more than academic outcomes, the report’s findings are generally in line with the results of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered in Oklahoma and nationwide in 2024.

Oklahoma’s composite score on the NAEP fourth-grade reading test was significantly better than only two states nationwide, while in 8th grade reading Oklahoma did not outrank any state.

The WalletHub report prompted both partisan attacks and calls for increased spending.

For example, the Oklahoma Senate Democrats Campaign Committee tweeted, “A Republican-led Oklahoma is bad for education,” and called for “increased public education funding.”

However, Oklahoma’s poor ranking follows several years of dramatic increases in public-school funding. And several experts cited in the WalletHub report explicitly warn that there’s little reason to expect outcomes to improve if officials increase spending without making other changes.

The WalletHub report included a section in which six experts from across the nation were asked, “Does variation in per-pupil spending explain most of the variation in school quality?”

Ashlyn Aiko Nelson, adjunct associate professor in the School of Education at Indiana University, provided a blunt response: “No; in fact, variation in per-pupil spending explains very little variation in school quality.”

Paul Bruno, assistant professor of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, expressed a similar viewpoint, saying that “per-pupil spending won’t tell you very much about how effective a school is.”

Jill Channing, associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at East Tennessee State University, noted that “there are states that invest heavily in education but do not consistently rank among the best-performing, which suggests that governance structures, community engagement, and policy coherence also play substantial roles.”

Channing said spending increases “must be allocated strategically to make a meaningful difference.”

Rosemary Salomone, professor of law at St. John’s University, told WalletHub that additional funding will improve outcomes “only if those funds are well spent and targeted toward the indicators that directly impact performance.”

Since 2018, Oklahoma public-school funding has exploded.

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 that year, that comes out to an average of $13,736 per pupil.

That means per-pupil revenue has increased by an astounding 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-pupil revenue in Oklahoma is now significantly more than the average private-school tuition in Oklahoma, according to figures compiled by Private School Review.

Despite the dramatic increase in funding for Oklahoma schools since 2018, academic results have not improved. In fact, they have gotten worse.

The average ACT composite score in Oklahoma schools was significantly lower in 2024 than in 2018.

Researchers say 10 points on a state’s NAEP scale score roughly equates to a year of learning. Oklahoma’s fourth-grade reading NAEP score has declined nine points since 2019.

Other reviews of Oklahoma school funding have also highlighted the strong growth in public-school revenue—and the lack of associated improvement in academic outcomes.

When officials with Edunomics Lab analyzed data from 2013 to 2024, tracking NAEP 4th grade reading and 8th grade math scores alongside per-pupil spending, they found that Oklahoma’s per-pupil spending increased 47 percent during that decade, but NAEP scores in both reading and math are far lower today than in 2013. Oklahoma’s spending increase far outpaced inflation during that time.

In a report released in April, the National Education Association (NEA) similarly found that Oklahoma had $13,028 in revenue receipts per student, based on fall enrollment from the 2023-2024 school year, and $14,066 in revenue receipts per student when calculated based on average daily attendance.

The data in the NEA report bolsters Channing’s observation that some states are producing subpar academic outcomes despite outspending many other states.

For example, in the WalletHub review only one state ranked worse than Oklahoma in the report’s “quality” ranking: New Mexico. But New Mexico has per-pupil revenue of $18,075, according to the NEA, which outranks 20 states, including Oklahoma.

In contrast, while the NEA report ranked Mississippi 40th in per-pupil revenue, only six states scored higher than Mississippi on NAEP’s most recent round of fourth-grade reading tests. And when adjusted for student demographics, such as poverty, the Urban Institute found that Mississippi had the best fourth-grade reading outcomes in the nation even as it was outspent by nearly four-in-five states.

Similarly, while the NEA report showed that Utah schools had per-pupil revenue of $13,860 – less than Oklahoma—Utah’s education system ranked 11th best overall in the WalletHub report and 12th best in quality.

Jamie Kudlats, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, explained the wide variations in state outcomes and spending by telling WalletHub, “How resources are allocated and used is much more important than how much money is spent.”