Oklahoma has the third highest percentage of teachers in the classroom of any state in the nation, putting about 6 percentage points more of its total staff actually into the classroom than the U.S. average. Oklahoma also allocates a higher percentage of its personnel in the classroom than any of our neighboring states, approximately 5 percentage points more than the regional average. The percent of teachers interacting and instructing students is one of the best measures of school efficiency. As the two tables below indicate, Oklahoma fares very well in this measure. A large portion of the remaining 42% of school employees are also directly involved in instruction, such as librarians, guidance counselors, and teachers aides.

Source: "Public School Student, Staff and Graduate Counts by State, School Year 1997-98" National Center for Education Statistics

 

Source: "Public School Student, Staff and Graduate Counts by State, School Year 1997-98"
National Center for Education Statistics

As with any data, problems with reporting and interpretation may occur. The next section of this report explains how some expenditure and other types of data can also present interpretation problems.
Policy makers should be made aware of the limitations of financial data and supplement it with other information as necessary to get a complete picture.

Why Financial Percentages Can Be Misleading:
Recently much attention has been give to the percent of school expenditures going to administration or instruction in Oklahoma's public schools. There are a number of problems with relying on this approach exclusively. Those problems include:

• Oklahoma's low teacher salaries have a direct impact on the higher administrative percentages in the state. For example, if Oklahoma raised its average teachers salary of $31,149 to the national average of $45,582, administrative costs would be reduced by 12 percent to 3.13%.
  
  
• Lower administrative costs do not automatically lead to more resources in the classroom. For example, Florida, which boasts having the 6th lowest percentage of (1.1%) administrative costs also has one of the lowest percentages (48.6%) of teachers in the classroom. Indiana also has low administrative costs but is also putting a low percentage of its personnel actually into the classroom. These two examples illustrate how low administrative costs are not necessarily good indicators of resources being allocated into the classroom.
  
  
• Certain administrative, transportation, food service, and support expenditures are fixed costs. States with higher fixed costs such as high free and reduced school lunch programs will inevitably have higher administrative/support costs.
  
  
• A one year snapshot of a districts costs could lead to unfair assessments of that district's administrative expenditures. Some districts may face one time legal costs or coding errors which could distort their administrative expenditures to appear higher than in other more typical years.
  
  
• Coding errors or differences in interpretation among districts and states may distort how resources are actually allocated Questionnaires/surveys are developed by groups, such as NCES, then distributed to literally thousands of school districts across the nation, which are charged with categorizing their personnel. Despite the fact that survey instructions attempt to guide school districts to uniformly categorize costs and employment figures, some inevitable differences in interpretation as well as coding errors occur. For example, in some districts, especially small ones, it is not uncommon for a principal or a superintendent to also drive a school bus, provide grounds maintenance, and other duties that may fall into different personnel categories, in addition to their administrative responsibilities. Such differences can have the results of districts rearranging their cost data in a manner which appears to have reduced or increased their administrative spending or instructional spending.

Teachers as a Percentage of Total Staff (1998)

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, "Public School Student, Staff, and Graduate Counts by State, School Year, 1997-98," April 1999