This issue isn’t abstract for me. I’m the only candidate in this LD20 race who came up through public K-12 system myself so I know firsthand what public schools can do when they work. And I have a 15-year-old daughter in public school right now so when I talk about reading scores and recovery I’m not just talking about a spreadsheet, I’m talking about her classroom.
I spent 31 years in uniform learning one hard lesson over and over: you don’t fix a problem by throwing more resources at it without first understanding what’s actually broken. You diagnose it, build a plan, and hold every dollar accountable to a result. I spent much of that same time leading a $1B (that’s a B) pipeline in the private sector, where the same rule applied: spend doesn’t equal outcome unless you design it to. That P&L focus is exactly what’s needed now in the Unicameral!
The Numbers Nebraska Doesn’t Like to Talk About
An independent Harvard/Stanford/Dartmouth analysis – the Education Recovery Scorecard – ranks Nebraska 37th of 38 reporting states in math academic growth and 33rd of 35 in reading growth from 2022 to 2025. Looking further back, on pandemic recovery since 2019, Nebraska ranks 33rd in math and a startling 48th in reading, which is one of the worst reading-recovery showings in the country.
Chronic absenteeism, one of the biggest drivers of lost learning, has barely moved, down from roughly 24% in 2022 to about 21% in 2025, still nearly 7 points above pre-pandemic levels.
I want to be clear: Nebraska schools are not failing outright. We still rank 5th overall and 11th in education on U.S. News’s 2026 Best States list, and 7th nationally on the math NAEP. But those numbers reflect legacy strength built over decades, not where we’re headed. Growth and recovery are the leading indicators, and they’re sliding fast.
Here’s the Part Every Taxpayer in Nebraska Should Understand
If academic outcomes are sliding, why does the K-12 budget keep climbing? This is exactly the kind of question I ran into constantly managing large budgets: the number going up doesn’t tell you what the number is actually buying. And in this case, most Nebraskans have never been told the honest answer.
Most of the “increase” in state K-12 dollars isn’t instructional spending. It’s property tax relief.
Core TEEOSA state aid – the formula that funds actual classroom operations – has grown only about 20% over nine years, near or below inflation. The dramatic growth in total state K-12 “support” comes from two newer funding streams built to offset local property taxes, not to move a single test score:
| State K-12 Funding Stream | FY2019-20 | FY2024-25 |
| TEEOSA state aid | $1.066 B | $1.163 B |
| Property tax credits (LB1107) | $0 | $750 M |
| Education Future Fund | $0 | $250 M |
| Total state support | $1.066 B | $2.163 B |
Source: Platte Institute analysis of Nebraska Department of Education state aid data, 2025.
Roughly $1 billion in new state money since 2020 was never designed to move achievement. It was designed to lower property tax bills, which is a goal I fully support, but one we’ve let get tangled up with education funding in a way that misleads the public. I’ve called the current property tax relief mechanism a “bucket with a hole in it” – a cash-transfer system that needs structural repair, not just bigger transfers. Judging it by test scores, and judging test scores by it, is comparing two different missions as if they were one.
Second, Nebraska’s district structure mechanically drives per-pupil costs up, independent of what happens in any classroom. About 154 of Nebraska’s 244 school districts (mostly rural) have declining enrollment, but fixed costs like buildings, minimum staffing, and transportation don’t shrink to match. Growing urban districts add cost from the opposite direction, hiring and building to keep pace. Per-pupil spending rises almost by design. And to be fair to our schools, this isn’t a bloated-bureaucracy story. Nebraska’s own Legislative Fiscal Office data shows administrative staff share actually fell, from 6.4% to 5.5% of total staff between FY07 and FY17, and we spend below the national average on administration per pupil.
What’s Actually Broken and My Plan to Fix It
The rankings slide isn’t a resourcing problem. It’s concentrated in two specific, fixable places: stalled post-pandemic academic recovery and chronic absenteeism that hasn’t come close to pre-pandemic norms. Middle-income districts, which received the least pandemic relief and show the weakest recovery, are the most exposed now that federal COVID dollars have run out.
This isn’t a call for a bigger budget. It’s a call for the same standard I held in uniform and in the boardroom: a clear plan, measurable goals, and accountability for every dollar. In Lincoln, that means:
- Tie future TEEOSA growth to enrollment and outcome metrics, not automatic escalation. New dollars should be demonstrably connected to results, the same way I was held accountable for a $1B pipeline.
- Fix the property tax relief mechanism itself rather than just pouring more into a system fiscal analysts have already flagged as structurally leaky, and stop evaluating tax-relief programs by an academic yardstick they were never built to hit.
- Target remaining school-improvement dollars at middle-poverty districts that got the least pandemic aid and remain below 2019 achievement levels, instead of spreading resources evenly regardless of need.
- Attack absenteeism head-on because it’s the single largest drag on both math and reading recovery, and no curriculum fixes a student who isn’t in the building.
- Adopt evidence-based reading instruction, following the literacy reforms other states enacted in 2025-2026 in response to the same warning signs in their own NAEP data.
This Can’t Wait
Nebraska’s headline “best states” rankings will likely stay strong for a while even as the underlying trend keeps eroding, as that’s how composite indices built on legacy strength work. That lag is dangerous. It delays recognition of a real problem until it’s far more expensive to reverse.
Nebraskans deserve honesty about what their tax dollars are actually buying, whether it’s property tax relief or classroom instruction, not a budget number that gets waved around as proof everything’s fine. I didn’t run a billion-dollar pipeline, or lead troops in combat, by hoping problems would sort themselves out. I ran it by diagnosing what’s actually broken and holding every dollar to a result.
That’s the standard I’ll bring to education funding in the Unicameral: root cause, action plan, clear off-ramps. Not more spending for its own sake. Results, with a sense of urgency. As a product of public schools, and as a father with a daughter counting on them right now, I’m ready to take action for the future Good Life.