By Nathan Sanders and Dalena Wallace, Op-ed contributor
Every so often, an industry gets disrupted not by a competitor building something similar, but by someone who reimagines the product altogether.
Uber did this for transportation when it looked at millions of people already on the road and realized its fleet already existed — no new cars, no new infrastructure. The company’s success speaks for itself.
Decades ago, Milton Friedman had the same kind of groundbreaking idea for K-12 education. He argued that institutions without competition serve the system more than the people for whom they were built. His answer reimagined the education system: let the dollars follow the child, not the building.
Today, this idea has come to life. Parents are increasingly choosing alternative, innovative options like microschools and co-ops over traditional one-size-fits-all schooling — often funded by school choice programs.
American churches are uniquely positioned to answer this demand.
The buildings, the space, and the community already exist within the local church. With no new facilities or new organizations required, many churches can open their doors to microschools or co-ops on day one.
Microschools are small learning environments, often fewer than 15 students, meeting in homes, church classrooms, or community spaces. Hybrid co-ops gather kids two or three days a week, with parents covering the rest of school at home. These are fast-growing responses to a parent population increasingly dissatisfied with one-size-fits-all schooling and increasingly financially equipped to choose something different.
Roughly one in 10 school parents already enroll their child in a microschool, and 41% expressed interest in learning more, EdChoice’s 2024 polling with Morning Consult found.
The national mood reflects this demand. As of May 2026, only 28% of Americans said education was headed in the right direction nationally, while half said it was on the wrong track.
Official enrollment data likely undercounts the shift too. About 2.8% of students nationally are using a choice program, according to the 2026 EdChoice Share, but hybrid homeschoolers and microschoolers aren’t fully captured in those figures. The real footprint is bigger than the data shows.
Meanwhile, the policy tailwind is strong.
In 2025 alone, eight states enacted or expanded private school choice programs. Universal eligibility is now the norm, allowing ESA dollars to flow to microschool tuition, curriculum, and tutoring — precisely the costs a church-based model would generate. The financial barrier is lower than most church leaders assume.
The discipleship call already embedded in local churches maps naturally onto microschools or co-ops. Small groups, mentorship, and shared mission are nothing new.
Churches can immediately address one of the biggest barriers to entry for these schooling models: real estate. Most churches sit empty five to six days a week with square footage that could become, Monday through Friday, the most important learning environment in a child’s life and a local church’s ministry.
A church also doesn’t necessarily need accreditation or a large staff to start, just a few classrooms, a qualified teacher, and a handful of families.
It’s already happening in many places around the country. Pastor Dave Atherton of One Church at Pleasant View in Derby, Kansas, found himself with unused classroom space, and a local Christian microschool needed a home. He said yes. No rent, no red tape, just a willingness to treat education as a mission of the local church. When a hybrid homeschool enrichment program came knocking shortly afterwards, he said yes again. The result was One Learning Academy, a dual-track school offering both full-time and hybrid models under one roof, with retirees volunteering, grandparents mentoring, and families deeply engaged. Pastor Dave had no education background, but he had space, a community, and a willingness to start. This is now a part of the church’s mission.
Church leaders and Christian school administrators should view this moment as an invitation to lead, whether that means launching a satellite microschool, helping homeschooling families form a co-op, or opening a campus two days a week to a hybrid cohort. A project like this can seem daunting, but as with most things in ministry, it requires faith first, then a willingness to start.
Uber didn’t wait until it had a fleet of cars. It started with a network of people who already had what was needed. The church in America finds itself in a similar position. The buildings exist, the community exists, and the parental demand exists. Increasingly in many states, the funding exists too in the form of school choice programs.
Milton Friedman spent decades arguing that education would only improve when families had the freedom to choose. That freedom is arriving, state by state, program by program.
Now the question for Christian leaders is whether the Church will show up for it.
Nathan Sanders is Policy and Advocacy Director at EdChoice, a?501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to understanding and pursuing a K–12 education system that empowers every family to choose the schooling environment that fits their children’s needs best.
Dalena Wallace is the founder of AIM Educational Collaborative & Heartland Education Reformation Organization.