This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 28, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been three years since West Virginia embarked on a bold new path for its K-12 students

when it created the Hope Scholarship.

In doing so, the state has given parents more options for their kids and unleashed a variety

of innovative schooling options.

Jesse Troyen directs policy and research at the Cardinal Institute in West Virginia.

We spoke about the progress last week in Phoenix. From my perch in Central Kentucky, a state notably without any substantial educational freedom options for the vast majority of parents in our

Commonwealth, we've sort of watched West Virginia create and then expand to some extent its Hope Scholarship Act.

Can you walk us through just the general outlines of what that piece of legislation did and why it was such a big deal

for sort of ushering in a more universal type of educational freedom option in the United States.

Absolutely. So the Hope Scholarship Program is an education savings account program.

And what that does, a portion of a student's funding

that would be used if they were going

to the traditional public school, it now follows that individual in their, whatever

their educational pathway might be.

So some families may use this to enroll their child in a local private school.

Other families might use this for what's called in West Virginia an individualized instructional pathway.

And that is essentially homeschooling,

but we're being very careful to give it a separate legal distinction to protect the rights that homeschoolers have fought for long before the Hope

scholarship was an option in West Virginia. So kind of the way that this works in the mechanics is the way

that schools get funded there's three buckets. There's local funding, there's

...