87% of teachers feel prepared to teach in a district school. 34% feel prepared for a microschool — the sector now serving more than 750,000 children.
Teachers were asked how prepared they felt to teach in each kind of school. The answers fall in a straight line away from the model their preparation was built around:
Public district 87% · Private 74% · Charter 67% · Religious 49% · Microschools 34%.
The gap between the first and the last is 53 points. It is not a gap between good schools and bad ones; it is a gap between the setting preparation programs are designed for and the setting growing fastest.
Two things make the number worse than it looks. More than 70% of the people running microschools are current or former licensed teachers — these are not outsiders to the profession, they are its own graduates reporting that their training did not cover where they went. And the figure has not moved since 2023.
The data is EdChoice's own. That matters: the organization that most consistently documents the demand side published the clearest available statement of the supply-side problem, and the field has not yet answered it.
Cite as: When Money Follows the Child. The 53-point preparedness cliff. Field Note 01, July 2026. https://www.whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org/notes/01/ Accessed [date].