Zach Lahn, the Republican nominee for governor of Iowa, has a specific plan for the people who teach Iowa's children.

At a Moms for Liberty debate in January 2026, he said he wants to "wipe out the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners" — the state board that licenses teachers — and replace it with people who would "suspend their licenses or permanently take their licenses" when teachers "indoctrinate our kids."

Before he ran for governor of Iowa, Lahn co-founded a school in Wichita, Kansas.

It didn't have licensed teachers at all.

Wonder

The school is called Wonder. It opened in 2018 on the campus of Wichita State University, serving pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. It was financed by Chase Koch — the son of billionaire Charles Koch — and Chase Koch's wife at the time, Annie Koch. (Annie Koch and Lahn later each divorced their spouses and married each other; they have seven children in a blended family, and the kids appear in his campaign materials.)

Wonder did not seek accreditation through the Kansas Department of Education. Iowa Starting Line laid out what that means in practice: the school "was not required to follow state regulations, administer state tests, or hire licensed teachers."

Instead of teachers it had "guides" and "coaches." Students were grouped into multi-age studios. There were no traditional grades, no report cards, and no homework.

Set aside whether that's a good way to run a school — plenty of families would love it. The point is the double standard. Every rule Lahn wants to enforce on Iowa's teachers, and every measurement Iowa's public schools live and die by, is a rule his own school opted out of entirely.

He wants the power to revoke a licensed Iowa teacher's credential over "indoctrination." He ran a school where nobody needed a credential in the first place.

The $314 million

Lahn also said he would expand Iowa's ESA voucher program, the education savings accounts that send public money to private school tuition.

The program is already enormous. It cost Iowa taxpayers more than $314 million in 2025-26, up from $218 million the year before. By March 2026, the Des Moines Register reported that Iowa's ESAs subsidize 99% of the state's private school students.

Ninety-nine percent. That is no longer a program to help a struggling family find a different option. It is a second, publicly funded school system with none of the public system's obligations.

Meanwhile, in the schools that take every child who shows up, public school leaders describe ballooning class sizes and eliminated programs.

The accountability asymmetry

Here is the trade Iowa has made, stated plainly.

A public school in Iowa must accept every student in its boundaries, including the ones with disabilities and the ones who are expensive to teach. It must hire licensed teachers. It must administer state tests and publish the results. It must hold open school board meetings. If it fails, everyone can see it fail.

A private school taking voucher money is under none of those obligations, and the money follows the student out the door.

Lahn's answer to that asymmetry is to make it bigger — more voucher money going out, and tighter licensing control over the teachers who stayed.

We've documented where this road goes. In Arkansas, a voucher school where kids were made to scrub floors and a classmate was beaten kept getting state money. In Pennsylvania, Stacy Garrity says she'd back the new federal private-school tax credit "a hundred percent" in a state a court found unconstitutionally shortchanges poor districts. Nationally, 37 House Republicans signed a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

The pattern in his own record

The Wonder story is not an isolated fact about Lahn. It's the same story as the rest of his résumé.

He got his political start in 2014 as state director of Americans for Prosperity–Montana, the Koch network's flagship advocacy group, where he led the campaign to stop Montana from expanding Medicaid. It failed. His statement afterward claimed the vote stood "directly against the voices of millions of Montanans" — in a state whose entire population was about 1.02 million. He later conceded: "Two mistakes were made yesterday."

He then ran a school funded by a Koch. He is now running for governor of Iowa on a platform of moving public education money to private schools.

And as the Wall Street Journal found, the man selling this as Iowa common sense is a millionaire political operative who was still voting in Kansas as recently as 2022.

Iowa's public schools educate the overwhelming majority of Iowa's kids. They are being asked to absorb the cuts while the man who wants to run the state points the licensing board at their teachers.

We deserve better.

Source

"Co-founder of Wichita private school contending for Iowa GOP's gubernatorial nomination," Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, May 29, 2026, and "Meet Zach Lahn: Koch political operative running for Iowa Governor," Iowa Starting Line, June 2026.