Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Neil McCluskey. I'm the Director of the Center for Educational Freedom here at Cato. And with me today is Colleen Harncheck. And Colleen, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Sure. I'm the policy analyst at the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom,

and I focus mostly on school choice issues and the innovative educational models that we'll be talking about today.

Oh, that's a nice preview.

Yes.

So the Center for Educational Freedom, of course, we do a whole lot of stuff.

But the nucleus, the bread and butter of what we do is school choice, and

Colleen is really like our point person for school choice.

And today we're going to talk about, I think probably, you can correct me if I'm wrong,

Colleen, but with what you find most interesting about school choice, or most important.

And that is innovation.

I think one of the many benefits of grounding education and freedom, and we're always talking about school choice, but we should say educational freedom,

is parental choice and something that we also don't talk about enough, educator autonomy,

and that those things end up with producing innovation, which is really important.

When people can easily try new and different ways of doing things and they compete for business

on a level financial playing field, and that's important. A lot of this is about money.

It allows innovation to occur, I think, much more easily and to really flourish.

A lot more than it does if you have a top-down government monopoly, especially a government

monopoly, like, say, public schooling.

It also allows for a lot more specialization, and maybe you'll talk a bit about specialization.

So it's not just people trying new things, but it's lots of new

options that are more tailored to the needs of unique people, and every person actually is

...