Data-Driven Education Journalism for the Cornhusker State
Education News & Data
Local education reporting from every corner of Nebraska, grounded in Nebraska Department of Education data.
Gretna graduates 99.3% of its seniors. Omaha Public Schools, just across a municipal line, graduates 71.5%. The 27.8-point gap maps onto the most visible divide in Nebraska education.
Nebraska's 12th-grade chronic absenteeism rate hit 34.5% in 2024-25, more than double the kindergarten rate and triple the third-grade rate.
Nebraska's English learner graduation rate has fallen from 64% to 52% over 14 years while the overall rate barely moved. The 41-point gap to white students is the state's widest equity chasm.
Nearly three in four Nebraska districts still have higher chronic absenteeism than before COVID -- and not a single large district has recovered.
Grand Island Public Schools posted a 75.9% graduation rate in 2025, its worst on record. The district says an ELL enrollment policy change created a one-time bubble, but the underlying trend was already declining.
Nine Omaha-area school districts, separated by minutes on the highway, produce chronic absenteeism rates ranging from 7% to 45% -- a 38-point chasm.
Grade 12 hit an all-time high of 26,008 in 2025-26 while kindergarten dropped to 21,275, near its early-2000s trough, widening a gap that signals a shrinking enrollment pipeline.
Lexington and Schuyler graduate nearly 9 in 10 Hispanic students in Nebraska. The statewide white-Hispanic gap has still widened to 16.8 percentage points — but the meatpacking corridor shows it is not demographic destiny.
151 of 244 Nebraska public school districts enroll under 500 students, holding just 12.3% of the state's children while large suburban districts absorb all growth.
Omaha Public Schools' chronic absenteeism rate has plateaued near 45%, with nearly one in five OPS high schoolers missing more than a quarter of the school year.
Bennington, Gretna, and Elkhorn are the only Nebraska districts to post enrollment gains in all 21 year-over-year transitions since 2005.
Omaha Public Schools graduated 71.5% of its 2025 cohort — a 16.4-point gap to the state average, the widest on record. Inside the district, 1,085 students didn't finish on time.
Nebraska City had a chronic absenteeism rate of 2.9% before COVID. Six years later, it's 37.1% -- a 34-point increase that dwarfs every other district in the state.
Nebraska hit a 90% graduation rate in 2014 and has not returned. The rate looks stable at 88%, but a growing cohort means 760 more students per year don't finish on time.
Lincoln Public Schools is the only major Nebraska district where chronic absenteeism has worsened every year since 2020 -- bucking the statewide recovery trend.
