I found this cool service, StateScape.com, where guest visitors can search, for free, federal and states' legislation.  See what your State is doing about financial literacy!
 
I searched "financial literacy" in "All States", and the return was 315. 273, actually, after I eliminated duplicates.  That speaks volumes about the level of attention that Financial Literacy is finally receiving from our lawmakers, spurred now by the economic crisis.
 
What I especially like about StateScapes' engine is that the search results include hot links directly to the full text of the bill on each State's .gov site.  That means you get the latest, current version of the bill.
 
NCEE surveys the States every couple of years or so about their Economics and Personal Finance curricula. It's too bad 2007 is their latest Survey of the States, because ALOT has happened in States' financial literacy curricula since then.
 
Jump$tart has a map of Personal Finance curricula in States, but I'm not sure about their process. Illinois, for example, has required for many years completion of its Consumer Science course to graduate high-school, but because it's not called Personal Finance, they're not a "gold" state on Jump$tart's map. Incidentally, MoneyU is available to Illinois students through the Illinois Virtual School, as well as in classrooms, to meet the requirement. New Jersey passed a Personal Finance mandate more than a  month ago, but isn't yet a "gold' state either.

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The FTC seeks comments through November 30, 2009, on proposed amendments to the "Free Credit Report Rule", pertaining to those aggressive, deceptive, and irritating advertising and other practices by the credit bureaus. The proposed amendments require prominent disclosures on web, TV, Radio, and print, and prohibit  several now-common practices; ie, hyperlinking the consumer to places where he will never find the Free Credit Report to which he is entitled; or requiring the consumer to first establish an account. The amendments go into effect in February 2010.
 
Although required by law to provide a free credit report each year to consumers, the Bureaus are taking unfair advantage of consumers who request their report by trying to upsell them more services, or worse, by tricking consumers into paying for a report they're entitled to get for free.  The consumers they aim to take advantage of are the very ones trying to do their financially responsible duty, by staying on top  of their credit history.
 
Reading the amendments is a dismaying history of escalating deceptive practices by the Bureaus. The FTC absolutely should stop these predatory practices.  Legislation and regulatory oversight is essential, as is continuing financial education for consumers.
 
Knowing that they should periodically get and review their credit report is important, but knowing how is really useful.
Graduates of MoneyU have learned through simulations, for example,:

1. How to get a free copy of their report every four months, and avoid unnecessary upsells
2. How to read the report and identify errors, and
3. How to get errors corrected.

MoneyU enrollees also learn the components of a credit score, and what clues in their credit report might indicate identity theft.

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In case you missed Eileen Ambrose's article last week "Making Finance Fun?" on learning finance management through games, I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.

Online games can be a good way to acquire some personal finance knowledge because, as Ethan Mollick notes, they are self-directed and experiential: learners can safely experiment for different outcomes in order to understand complex and interrelated concepts. But games as vehicles for learning must be both pedagogically sound and empirically measured before they can claim to be effective. Sound pedagogy means there's a close match between the virtual experience and the skill-set required for success in real life. One could argue that spending virtual money in a virtual world is not a skill that young adults need to practice more. Empirical measures of learning include such time-honored assessment as improvement in quiz and test scores (as Doorways to Dreams has done), and changes in real-world behavior.

Young adults need to acquire some pretty complex skills to be workforce-ready and financially self-sufficient, like how to compare deductibles and co-pays on a healthcare plan, find and understand the Gotchas in their cardholder agreements, complete a 1040EZ, and create a plan for optimal student loan repayment.

Ms. Ambrose overlooked a game that teaches these very skills: MoneyU, which has no affiliation with the financial industry, and is a recipient of Tech & Learning’s prestigious Award of Excellence, as "one of the best education offerings of 2008". Its content and delivery are engagingly objective, frank, and relevant.

MoneyU's pre- and posttest data have been reviewed independently by assessment expert Dr. Jack Naglieri, whose findings demonstrate that MoneyU is significantly effective: no matter how low they score on the pretest, MoneyU's learners have a 98% pass rate on the posttest.

The game is in use in high schools and colleges around the country; check out this recent NBC news piece on St. Joseph College.

Katherine Griffin
Griffin Enterprises
MoneyU.com

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Last week, I attended the Second Annual Financial Literacy Leadership Conference (sponsored by the Society for Financial Education & Professional Development) Presenters and attendees were the Who's Who in Financial Literacy, forward-thinking change agents from Government, Non-Profits, and For-Profits.  An over-arching theme across all the sessions was Efficacy: What works, How to measure it, How to drive it.
 
This is timely, given the Federal Government is mobilizing missions and millions for financial literacy programs provided or overseen by Departments of Treasury, Education, Commerce, and the new Consumer Finance Protection Agency, among others.  
Ironically, one of the problems slowing our progress in Financial Literacy is that there are so many financial literacy "programs" out there that are marginally effective or worse.  Appallingly, many simply have no effectiveness measures at all.  "Website hits" and "number of clients served" have little merit of efficacy, and no merit whatsoever if their offerors are actually steering visitors to financial institutions that intend to sell them a credit card, a reverse-mortgage, or debt management services.
 
Quite frankly, considering the glut of financial literacy programs, those that don't measure the learning they deliver are just clutter in the way of real progress.

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I attended yesterday's public meeting of the Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC), which announced a significant and sensible change to the national strategy for financial literacy  that has been in effect since 2006. This new strategy includes a review of existing federal financial literacy programs, not merely to catalog them, but to identify the ones that work.

Halleluiah!

The new strategy is a step in the right direction, yet time's a-wasting! This is particularly the case for young adults about to graduate with all that student loan debt!

Tim Ranzetta of Student Lending Analytics  lays out components of the successful financial literacy strategy implemented in New Zealand and a critique of the FLEC's process and progress, or lack thereof, so far.  New Zealand's strategy is proof that dramatic and measurable progress can be made in a few years. Diana Crossan, New Zealand Retirement Commissioner, and presenter at the FLEC meeting, insists their success is due in large part to broad embrace of public, private, for-profit, and non-profit participants.

This is such a critical issue; and the problem is so enormous. If we are truly looking for things that work, why wouldn’t we open up our search beyond the federal domain? There's plenty of room for many approaches, targeting different demographics, targeting different financial topics and skills, targeting different life-stages, etc.  I think we’d all agree that sinking more time, money and energy into programs that don't work, no matter how good they make us feel, is something we can ill afford.

Let’s identify all of the programs that work, government, for profit and non profit, and employ them to solve this urgent problem now!

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We have a national crisis in financial literacy, particularly among young adults. I believe this is a crisis we as a nation can no longer wait to address. As many of you also know from firsthand experience, MoneyU is a start to solving this crisis. To date, thousands of young adults have benefited from MoneyU’s engaging and effective approach to delivering personal financial education. While I am pleased to have had that many students take MoneyU, it's far too few to make even a small dent in the crisis. We must do more, and more we shall . . .

A few weeks ago we made a decision to offer MoneyU virtually free to high school seniors and college freshmen, through their schools until June 1, 2010. We would like to be in a position to make it truly free, but as you know there are real costs to develop and deliver this kind of education. As a small business we can’t afford to bear all of those costs. As a result we will be charging schools a fee of $4.00/learner to help defray those costs. Schools may begin buying blocks of logins today.

If this virtually free offer is as successful as we hope it will be, there is a possibility that we will recoup more than our costs. If that happens we intends to distribute 50 percent of any additional funds to two not-for-profit organizations that focus on delivering financial literacy programs to hard-to-reach and underserved populations. The names of the two organizations will be selected from a list of 10 and will be announced in mid-October.  The other ½ will be used to further develop and enhance MoneyU so that it continues to be a relevant and useful resource for young adults.

We are doing one more thing to make access to MoneyU as affordable to as many young adults as possible. For students whose schools don’t participate in the Virtually Free offer, we will offer MoneyU at 70% off the current individual login cost of $49.95. That means that anyone will be able to go to www.MoneyU.com and buy a login for $14.95.

I hope you share my excitement about these developments. If you do, please spread the word to your colleagues and friends and encourage them to take advantage of this offer by visiting our revolutionary new financial literacy game website. In order to keep our costs down we are using PR and word-of-mouth as our primary means to get the word about this offer out and your help would be much appreciated.

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The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which passed just one year ago, contained new requirements for student loan guarantors to provide financial literacy programs. Many but not most guarantor agencies have been offering some sort of financial literacy help for students, varying widely in approach and effectiveness: for some, it's a 3-fold brochure in the financial aid office, for others, it's a student rally, for still others, it's a website from which financial aid counselors can download documents.

Such as they are, many campus-based financial literacy programs will soon be obviated by the dissolution of the FFELP, as the government takes over Direct Student Loans.

 The recent release of the rising default rates on student loans barely hint at what's really coming, and not just because the latest available data are two years behind. For one thing, in 2007 the distant thunder of the approaching economic storm was barely audible.  For another, Congress has since improved how the default rate is calculated; it now counts the number of borrowers in repayment for 3 years, not 2. This is a much more accurate picture of defaults, and a MUCH higher number, but this formula doesn't apply until 2008 data. 

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While the findings aren't at all shocking to those of us who embrace online learning, kudos to the Department of Education for undertaking the study, and for publishing the results. 

Steve Lohr of the New York Times nicely summarizes the 93-page report: Study Finds that Online Education Beats the Classroom.  But if you want the original details, here's the full report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning.   

Too many schools persist in the notion that learning can only or best take place in a classroom, with teacher-centric instruction. Teaching may happen best in a classroom, but Learning happens best with Learner-centric instruction (and the best teachers deliver learner-centric). 

That's because well-designed online instruction can be

Adaptive to the learner; speeding up, slowing down, or going deeper, depending on the learner's knowledge.

Immersive; inviting the learner to play and experiment for different outcomes, without classroom distractions.

Learner-centric; less dependent on the skills or subject-expertise of the teacher.

As more schools, educators, legislators, and policy-makers insist on empirical measures of effective instruction, in both classroom and in online environments, we'll be able to continuously improve the learning experience, and create deeply engaging and lasting learning.

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