‘Ghost Student’ Reform Pays Off ~ MuskogeePolitico.com

‘Ghost student’ reform pays off

In 2021, state lawmakers considered reforming school funding. In principle, they wanted to fund schools based on the number of students, rather than the number of students who used to be present a district.

The school management responded with the rhetoric that ‘the sky is collapsing’.

But three years later, the sky hasn’t fallen. Instead, a new report shows that this simple reform has resulted in about $180 million in better allocation.

Before 2021, schools received funding based on current year enrollments, previous year enrollments, or two years prior enrollments, whichever was higher.

In practice, this meant that schools with declining enrollment were paid for “ghost students” who were not found in those districts.

In the 2020-2021 school year, districts received $195 million for 55,236 ghost students. Defenders of ghost student funding portrayed it as a boon to small, rural schools, but Oklahoma City (nearly 6,800 ghost students) and Tulsa (3,291 ghost students) were among the biggest beneficiaries. Just 22 districts accounted for 30,691 ghost students that year, or more than 55 percent.

That’s why lawmakers voted in 2021 to clamp down on the practice, requiring schools to base their per-pupil funding on the number of students in the current school year or the final weighted average daily enrollment from the previous school year.

A new report from the Reason Foundation finds that there has been a massive drop in funding for ghost students in Oklahoma since then — a decline of nearly 93 percent.

In the 2022-23 school year, Reason’s report found that only 155 of Oklahoma’s 541 school districts, or 28.7 percent, received declining enrollment funding. There were an estimated 3,777 ghost students statewide, costing $14.03 million.

In 2021, the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA) said that ghost student funding reforms would result in “destabilizing and shrinking budgets, staffing, programs and class sizes” in schools.

The chairman of the Cooperative Council of School Governors (CCOSA) also defended the financing of ghost students.

But there has not been a wave of school district closures. In fact, total school funding has reached historic levels. And thanks to reform, funding is now more closely tied to the children it actually serves.

State Rep. Kyle Hilbert, a Republican from Bristow who authored the legislation to reform the system, recalled that “countless lies were hurled at the Legislature” about the bill, but fortunately lawmakers “clung to the idea that the math and the truth were on our side.”

“This report from Reason confirms everything we said three years ago,” Hilbert said. “House Bill 2078 has ensured that an additional $180 million will be spent on students who actually exist, instead of on ghost students.”

It never made sense to pay schools to educate children who didn’t exist. But common sense often leads to fierce opposition from special interests in the Oklahoma Capitol. The Reason Foundation study shows that lawmakers were right to ignore the lobbyists.

Jonathan Small is chairman of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.