Oklahoma is asking its schoolchildren to pay for corporate tax breaks

Oklahoma’s Republican legislature is preparing to defund schools to pay for corporate tax breaks.

The August 25 ballot in Oklahoma asks voters to amend the state constitution so the Legislature can stop reimbursing school districts, towns, and counties for property tax revenue lost when new and expanding manufacturers take a five-year exemption. State Question 844. The exemption stays. The backfill goes. The school districts eat the difference.

Here is what that looks like on a school budget. Oklahoma’s per-pupil state aid runs roughly $3,800 a year. A class of twenty-five brings in $95,000 in state money — enough to cover a teacher’s salary and benefits, and not much else. When a manufacturer builds a major facility in a fast-growing district like Yukon or Mustang in Canadian County — one of the state’s fastest-growing areas, where aerospace and logistics employers have been expanding — the school district that would have collected property-tax revenue on that facility loses the money for five years. Under current law, the state makes the district whole. State Question 844 lets the Legislature decide, year by year, whether to keep writing that check. Speaker Kyle Hilbert and Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton say the reimbursement system has grown expensive and uneven, concentrated in a few counties. The Legislature gets the discretion. The districts that are growing fastest and have the most manufacturing activity get the uncertainty.

This is the mechanism Jonathan Kozol named three decades ago. Local property taxes are the load-bearing revenue for public schools. When a town gives a manufacturer five years of tax exemption, the district that educated the workers’ children — the district that, in twenty years, will be hiring the workers’ grandchildren — loses the revenue. The backfill was the promise. State Question 844 lets the state break the promise by degrees, year by year.

The federal pattern says what happens when the backfill is a promise and not a check. The federal government committed in 1975 — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, signed by Gerald Ford — to cover forty percent of the additional cost of educating students with disabilities. That promise has never been met. The shortfall for the 2024–2025 school year ran roughly thirty-nine billion dollars. Divide by the seven million students IDEA covers and you get $5,500 per child the federal government promised to fund and did not deliver. A full-time classroom aide in an Oklahoma school earns about $24,000 a year. Five children with disabilities in one elementary, at $5,500 in federal shortfall each — that is $27,500, enough to hire one aide and have money left for the materials that aide needs. That is the math every principal in the country runs in March when next year’s staffing has to be decided. Title I, the federal program for high-poverty schools, has failed to keep pace with inflation for a quarter-century. The pattern is consistent: the promise gets made, the money goes somewhere else, and the school absorbs the difference.

I am writing this from a Philadelphia kitchen table, not an Oklahoma one. But the mechanism has a number attached here too. The median Philadelphia home — mine included — is assessed at roughly $220,000. The school-district portion of the property-tax levy works out to about $1,700 a year. More than half of every property-tax dollar a Philadelphia homeowner pays goes to the school district. Philadelphia has had its own version of this bargain: a ten-year tax abatement on new construction that exempts the improvement value from property taxes for a decade. In Fishtown — six blocks from where I sit — hundreds of new townhouses and condos have been built over the past ten years paying school-district taxes on the pre-improvement land value only: what a vacant lot would pay, not a $600,000 townhouse. The district collected on the empty lots. It did not collect on the buildings that replaced them. Multiply that across every developing neighborhood in the city and you start to see why the school district runs structural deficits while the neighborhoods around it boom. The backfill Oklahoma promises in its constitution is a version of the same deal Philadelphia made quietly with every developer who filed the paperwork.

Oklahoma is asking to formalize what Philadelphia found out the expensive way. Once the reimbursement is no longer constitutionally required, every district whose tax base can be eroded — by exemptions, abatements, or simple legislative underfunding — becomes one session away from absorbing the cost. The teachers hired because the backfill was there. The aides. The programs. Canadian County’s school leaders have said the backfill is the difference between staffing at current levels and cutting. In a district growing as fast as Mustang or Yukon, where new housing developments are straining class sizes and hiring has not kept pace, losing the backfill means losing positions the district cannot afford to fund any other way. The bottom of the budget does not negotiate.

Anne Helen Petersen, in Can’t Even, named burnout a structural condition, not a personal failure. Oklahoma’s teachers are not burning out because they have failed to optimize their lesson plans. They are burning out because the funding foundation underneath their classrooms is being treated as discretionary — something the state honors when it is convenient and cuts when it is not. That is not teacher failure. That is a policy choice imposed at the teacher’s expense.

Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical, names it from the child’s end: “Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care.” The five children in an Oklahoma elementary whose school just lost a funding line to a manufacturing exemption do not need the Legislature’s discretion. They need the aide who was supposed to be in the room.

Pennsylvania’s William Penn v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, decided by the state Commonwealth Court in February 2023 on constitutional grounds, held that property-tax-dependent school funding violated the constitutional guarantee of a thorough and efficient education. Linda Darling-Hammond has spent two decades documenting what high-performing systems actually look like — Finland, Singapore, Ontario — and they do not look like a state deciding every year whether to honor the promise it made to its school districts. They look like a state that funds the school, automatically, every year, regardless of whether a factory opened or a tax break was handed out.

The vote is August 25. The exemption stays. The backfill is what’s on the ballot.