Oklahoma Farm & Ranch Museum, Elk City

Could doing away with Oklahoma’s income tax shift taxes not only onto low and middle-income families but also from urban areas to rural areas? Many programs, services, and incentives important for rural Oklahoma rely on our existing revenue structure and the income tax in particular.  In addition, switching to more reliance on other taxes would especially hurt farmers and ranchers.

States without an income tax have to get resources somewhere to fund their core services.  As the chart below shows, the majority of those states look to the property tax to fill the gap.  Every one of the states without an income tax pay more in property taxes per capita than we do in Oklahoma. The average per capita property tax collections in no-income tax states, $1,507, is more than two-and-a-half times that of Oklahoma, $582. Read the rest of this entry »

After three straight years of budget cuts, funding for public education in Oklahoma is in dire straits.  This year’s appropriation to the Department of Education is $254 million, or 10.0 percent, less than it was in 2009.  In the past three years, funding to school districts through the state aid formula, which funds the basic operating costs of schools, has been slashed by $222 million, while public schools enrollment has grown by 22,000 students.  According to the most recent data, the number of teachers was cut by over 1,000 between 2010 and 2011, and this year it is likely there are fewer teachers still. Even though schools have tried to manage cuts while protecting class sizes, simple math dictates that more students and fewer teachers is leading to more kids per class.

Meanwhile, the Legislature has also cut the activities budget for common education, which funds health care costs for teachers and support staff, as well as a portion of retirement costs and programs that aim to improve teacher quality and student performance. This year,  the Department of Education was forced to eliminate or drastically cut a slew of programs, including adult education, alternative education, Great Expectations, A+ Schools, and Literacy First. With its activities budget slashed, the department also opted not to allocate $11.4 million to fund the $5,000 annual bonus promised to some 3,300 National Board Certified teachers and saved $37 million by funding only ten months of teacher and support staff health care benefits for current year contracts. Outrage in the education community over this failure to meet the state’s commitments on health care costs and board certified teachers led some elected officials to promise to make up the funding as mid-year supplementals to this year’s budget. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Oklahoma Policy Institute released an issue brief exploring State Question 744, the proposal that will appear on the November ballot that would peg Oklahoma’s education spending to the regional average per pupil expenditure in six neighboring states. On our website you can read the full issue brief or a one-page summary; you’ll also find links to the  language of the ballot measure and to the websites of the pro- and anti-SQ 744 coalitions. Here is the press release that we put out explaining why we believe SQ 744 to be the wrong solution for Oklahoma:

State Question 744, the proposed constitutional amendment that would peg the annual education budget in Oklahoma to funding levels in six neighboring states, is the wrong solution to a real problem, according to a new issue brief from Oklahoma Policy Institute.

“We know that education funding in Oklahoma has failed to keep pace,” said David Blatt, OK Policy’s Director and the report’s author. “However, the challenges faced by common education in Oklahoma are shared across the broad spectrum of state government. By mandating huge spending increases for common education without an overall expansion of state revenues, SQ 744 creates the strong likelihood of setting the state further behind in all our other critical areas of public investment, including higher education, health care, human services, and public safety. This outcome would harm all Oklahomans, including our schoolchildren and teachers.” Read the rest of this entry »

The House of Representatives Appropriation and Budget Committee recently held hearings on an interim study of State Question 744. State Question 744, also known as the HOPE petition, is an initiative sponsored by the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA) that would require the state to fund education at the regional average of per-pupil spending. Reps. Leslie Osborn and Randy McDaniel asked for the interim study to explore the impact of the initiative on the state’s finances. Read the rest of this entry »