Oklahoma Education and You

Oklahoma education has a weight problem. The state funding formula is based on weighted students, with funding allocations adjusted by individual student characteristics. Students are weighted differently by grade level, economic disadvantage, bilingual status, gifted status, district size relative to its student population, school size, and even the experience level of their teachers. How the state got to this point is a convoluted tale, but those who created the funding formula and have adjusted it have touted equity as the reason for the weights.

However, all this weighting has not resulted in equity in outcomes for students. When comparing economically disadvantaged students with their non-economically disadvantaged peers, proficiency rates on state math and reading assessments tell a troubling story. The gap between the percentages of non-economically disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged students in Oklahoma City Public Schools who score proficient on the state reading assessment is 41 percentage points (66.1% to 19.3%). For math, the gap is 39.9 points (57.7% to 15.8%). While this is the largest gap among all school districts in the state, of the 406 districts I was able to obtain data for from the state report card site, 366 showed at least a 10-percentage-point gap.

These proficiency gaps persist despite $537,760,852.20 in funding being provided to schools based on the number of economically disadvantaged students. That’s just money in the state aid formula. It does not include federal Title I funds specifically earmarked to improve the learning of economically disadvantaged students.

These questions come to mind when considering the amount of money for schools generated by the economically disadvantaged. First, is this not enough money to fund research-backed programs and strategies to improve learning for free- and reduced-price lunch students? Second, are non-economically disadvantaged students benefiting from the programs and strategies, and is the proficiency gap due to factors at home, despite the school’s efforts to lift all students? Third, is there enough money in the formula to cover the economically disadvantaged weights, or are they folded into operational, regular programming costs or other district priorities?

Unfortunately, that is hard to tease out from the public data provided by the State Department of Education. Unlike Federal Title I funding and state Gifted Education Funding, schools do not have to provide details of how Economically Disadvantaged dollars are used.

Oklahoma is not alone in this. However, some states, such as Kansas, Michigan, and New Mexico, require documentation of how the dollars generated by their funding for at-risk students are spent, including the dollar amounts allocated to specific programs and the expected results from that programming. California requires an annual Local Control and Accountability Plan that outlines how the district will allocate funds and specifically address students’ needs.

Oklahoma requires reporting of programming and dollar amounts for Federal Funds allocations, but not for how money generated by the economically disadvantaged is allocated.

Given concerns about school funding and educational outcomes, I hope that Governor Stitt’s commission to study school spending in Oklahoma conducts a deep dive into how funds generated by economically disadvantaged students are used and why.