OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma’s chief of public schools asked state lawmakers for a mostly flat education budget but indicated the state could benefit from a far larger investment.
In a budget hearing at the state Capitol on Monday, state Superintendent Lindel Fields requested $4 billion for public education, $23 million more than the state’s current spend to account for the rising cost of educators’ health insurance. Lawmakers will consider the request when crafting a state budget for the 2027 fiscal year.
He also gave a list of priorities without a cost attached to them: school security, raising first-year teacher salaries, teacher development, school leader training and improving literacy.
Fields described these priorities as fundamentals that would enable the state to execute a broader strategy toward academic improvement, particularly in elementary reading.
“Those are the X’s and O’s,” he said while making a football analogy. “We get those right, I think we can successfully run the plays — this year’s play being early literacy.”
Legislative leaders have said literacy is among their top priorities this year, too. However, when House and Senate lawmakers asked Fields in the joint budget hearing how much he’d like to spend on his priorities, he said he didn’t yet have a specific dollar amount to request.
Although public education is the Legislature’s largest state government expense, Oklahoma ranks near the bottom in the country in per-pupil spending, Fields said, and behind most bordering states in average pay for first-year teachers with $41,152, even when considering cost of living differences.
He noted Mississippi — whose leap in literacy scores local policymakers hope to emulate — has spent hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to improve its reading outcomes. If Oklahoma hopes to move the needle, he said, “having a reading specialist in every elementary school is a direction we need to head (toward).”
“The numbers add up pretty quickly, to give you a specific number for the future of education,” Fields said. “If we want to be competitive for first-year teachers, if we want to provide safe schools, we want to improve literacy, it’s substantial. It’s a substantial investment.”
Republican lawmakers, though, took note when Fields said about half of the $12,000 Oklahoma spends per pupil is applied to non-instructional expenses.
“I think one of the areas that is a struggle for this body is when you see record levels of investment but you also see steady growth in non-instructional spending and the growth of that outpacing the growth of classroom expenditures,” said Rep. Chad Caldwell, R-Enid, who leads a House subcommittee on education funding.
Some of that, Fields said, comes down to how the state classifies certain expenditures.
State records show, for example, dollars spent on instructional technology, curriculum development, instructional staff training, school counselors, speech pathology and school libraries all fall outside of the “instruction” category in the state’s accounting system.
Some items on Fields’ priority list would correlate with bills lawmakers already filed ahead of their 2026 legislative session, which begins Feb. 2.
For example, Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, submitted legislation to continue a $50 million-per-year school security program and to set up a framework for school principal training and mentorship.
Multiple lawmakers have filed bills hoping to improve early elementary reading scores and to increase teacher salaries.
Oklahoma Voice is an affiliate of States Newsroom, a nation 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and donations focused on delivering state government news. The Voice maintains full editorial independence. For more stories by Oklahoma Voice go to oklahomavoice.com.