CFPB FinEx Webinar April 28, 2016 100 pm CT Good afternoon and thank you all for holding. Your lines have been placed in a listen-only mode until the question and answer portion of today’s conference. I would like to remind all parties the call is now being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. And I would now like to turn the call over to . Thank you. You may begin. Great. Thank you so much and welcome everyone to our CFPB Financial Education Exchange -- or FinEx -- webinar. We have a special topic today on evidence-based insights, tips for strengthening financial education curriculum. Whoops, sorry. We’re reorganizing the room here. Okay. Next slide. Great. So just quickly, as start off we just want to make clear that our usual disclaimer that while this is being done by the CFPB, it does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice. And opinions stated are those of the presenter. And as this is the first webinar where we have some non-CFPB staff speaking, we just want to be clear that we’re not affiliated with and we are not endorsing any of the speakers or entities participating or making any representations or warranties about those other products, services, or entities. So, wanted to say that up front. Great. All right. Now that we’re done with that part, we can get on to the more interesting things. So just a quick word for those of you who are new to this and have not been on a FinEx webinar or aren’t familiar with the Bureau, we’re the new federal agency in town. We’re about five years old now, with the mission of helping consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. And it’s really that last part of controlling economic lives and educating consumers that is what’s driving kind of our work here today. Thank you. Just a quick note that we are with the Office of Financial Education, which is within the Consumer Education and Engagement Division of the Bureau. Part of the Bureau does regulatory and market-based work, but part works directly with consumers and with entities who help consumers, like people on this call, I presume. And the Financial Education Office also works with some of the other offices that work with older Americans, service members, students, and others to help educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions. Sorry. We’re having some clicking issues here. There we go. I’ll just - I always do a couple slides on FinEx when we start. I know probably many of the people on this call are familiar with it, but because we always have some new folks, and particularly this time as we are adding in folks who are working on K-12 issues for this particular webinar topic, just a note that CFPB FinEx is an online and in-person exchange for financial educators where you can get regular news and updates from the Bureau about financial education, research, and topics. You can share information back with us through surveys about what you’re learning, and also we do some in-person convening and other ways to help financial educators meet each other and learn from each other. And by that, we mean all different kinds of financial educators -- housing counselors, credit counselors, financial coaches -- anyone who is concerned with helping consumers make financial decisions. And so if any of you are not part of FinEx already, if you’re not getting a monthly newsletter labeled CFPB FinEx, we encourage you to sign up by sending an email to cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov, cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov and just say you want to sign up and we will add you to the list to get regular updates about things like these webinars. Just really quickly, next slide, just a note -- we’ve been around for almost a year now. About 1,500 people around the country signed up. And I just want to note that this is actually our 12th monthly webinar. You can see up on the slide if you’re looking at the WebEx portion of this the other topics we’ve covered around owning a home, planning for retirement, measuring financial wellbeing, helping parents talk to kids about money. And all of them -- with just the exception of the student loan one -- are recorded and you can watch those webinars. You can get to them through our website, which I’ll show you in a second. So if any of these topics interest you, including this one if you want to hear this again later, it was all available on our website to watch the webinar. And just a quick note -- this is what the web page that is kind of about FinEx looks like, the resources for financial educators web page URL consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education. Not the catchiest, but that’s what we’ve got. And there you will see there’s always information about upcoming webinars and the archives or former, previous webinars and also all the tools and resources you can click on right there for financial educators -- different research reports, tools you can use with consumers. A lot of the things that we’ve covered in previous webinars you will find there. And we also have a print inventory of all the different tools and resources we have. We just updated it last month, so it has some new things in it. You can both print it out of look at it online at the same URL, adult financial education. And the last thing I’ll say before we get into the real meat of this is we also have an online discussion group on LinkedIn on financial education. I moderate that and I put up all the CFPB resources as they become available or news or things like that about what we do. And then we encourage all of you to put up your own resources, materials, questions. There’s usually several posts a day with different things about FinEx and related topics. So I encourage everyone to join that and keep up with things that are going on. So that is the end of the intro. Can you do the next slide? Sorry. We have a team here between clicking slides and speaking. It takes four or five of us to make all this happen. So just one more thing before I turn it over to our speakers. I just want to note that if you have any questions as we go, you can use the Q&A function. You can type into the WebEx a question and we will be monitoring that. Or if you have a question you want to ask at the end but want it just kind of teed up in that Q&A box, feel free to put it in and we’ll kind of keep an eye on that. After the presenters have all spoken, we will then open it up for questions over the phone. You will also have the opportunity to ask a question verbally if you prefer that. So again, you can both do Q&A as we go and we’ll monitor that, and then also we’ll break later for voice questions. So I just want to let you all know that. And so now, we will - we’ve gotten through the preliminaries. Again, I urge everyone to sign up for FinEx if you haven’t yet and look at the different resources we have. And I’m now very happy to introduce you to our speakers. We usually -- as I have noted in the newsletter that went out earlier this week -- FinEx deals primarily with adult financial education. We have other people at the Bureau that are handling Office of Education who work on K-12 and youth financial capability issues. But because many of you we know work on both or are concerned about both or interested in different ages and different populations, we have invited our K-12 folks and some partners of theirs to speak about a fairly newly released tool on youth financial capability and curriculum. So I’m going to turn it over to (Sunayna) who will kick us off. And is this the slide you want to be on? Okay. Yes, that’s fine. Thank you, Irene. Okay. Thanks so much for being here. It’s all yours. Great. Thank you and thanks to the hundred plus participants who joined us out of your busy day. So my name is Sunaena and like Irene, I work in the Office of Financial Education at CFPB. And in the webinar today, we’ll give you a brief overview of the youth financial education curriculum review tool. And like Irene mentioned, we’ll also invite our guest speakers to share their insights on how they’re using this tool or how they think that this tool can be leveraged by different stakeholders. Before we dive right in, I do want to just tell you a little bit about our work and the youth financial capability portfolio, if you could go back to that previous slide. Great, thank you. So, I’m part of a small team in our Office of Financial Education dedicated to supporting the financial capability -- meaning the knowledge, skills, and capabilities of children and youth. And our goal in this portfolio is to support and empower youth stakeholders to expand and improve access to financial education. And we’re achieving this work by strategically working in three different areas -- policy, practice, and parents. So our policy work, which is what I lead, helps create demand for financial education by encouraging policy approaches that give all American youth opportunities to build financial capability. Our work on the practices side seeks to build the financial capability of teachers, school administrators, and educators so that they can in turn deliver high quality financial education. And lastly, because parents are incredibly influential in how youth build financial capability, we develop and promote resources that help parents and caregivers have money conversations at home. And so on this front, we recently launched our Money as You Grow suite of resources that you may have heard about in the last FinEx webinar. So onto the next slide. I want to tell you a little bit about the speakers who will be joining us. And then after that, I will provide the overview of the curriculum review tool. So we are really delighted to have guest speakers featured on our webinar because it allows us to have a much more dynamic conversation and get perspectives from the field that, you know, we may not be able to provide. So this is a really exciting milestone for us. Our guest speakers are Ray Martinez and Laura Rosen. Ray Martinez is the Co-founder and President of EverFi’s Financial Education Division, where he leads efforts to bring EverFi’s web-based financial capability programs to both K-12 students and adults through partnerships with hundreds of financial institutions and organizations across the country. Today, EverFi serves more than 12,000 K-12 schools, including those in 2000 majority low income communities. Before founding EverFi, Ray was at Kaplan Inc. managing supplemental education programs across California, Virginia, and Texas. Our next speaker is Laura Rosen. Laura joined the Center for Public Policy Priorities in 2010 as a Policy Analyst. Her work is focused on financial education, asset building, and job quality policies. Laura completed her Masters of Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, Laura worked as the Relationship Manager at Wells Fargo and was a Fulbright Scholar in Peru where she researched microfinance. Our guests will be discussing later today in this webinar how the Youth Financial Education Curriculum Review Tool can be leveraged to advance financial capability. And they’ll share sort of their perspective on how they think that this tool can be of particular use to curriculum developers or content providers as well as policy implementers or policy leaders. In the next slide, I want to spend a little bit of time giving you an overview of what the Youth Financial Education Curriculum Review Tool is, since some of you may not be familiar with it. But before I start, I just want to say a few words about sort of why this tool exists. You know, research shows that financial education for youth can make a real difference in later financial well-being -- provided that it is implemented in a rigorous and developmentally appropriate way. With the curriculum review tools, CFPB hopes to contribute to this understanding of how high quality curriculums can be a key element of an effective financial education approach. One of the challenges for many educators -- whether you are working in a school setting or managing a program -- is knowing what resources to use to teach financial education. A many have told us, there are many options out there with really few resources to help them sort of navigate the range of curriculum or classroom resources that are available to them. And so based on this need, we developed this really hands on evidence-based tool that you can use to review and select financial education curricula. Using this curricula, you will be able to identify curricula that are accurate and unbiased, demonstrably effective, informed by existing financial education content standards and curriculum frameworks, and designed to help students develop a range of financial knowledge, skills, and capabilities. The other thing I want to point out about this curriculum is it is especially designed for financial education curricula and not necessarily individual lesson plans or activities, although there may be pieces of this that’s really useful for that. But I do want to stress that if you want to use the entire too, it’s really designed for curricula. And the way that we define curricula here is something that occurs over at least five sessions over multiple weeks within a single school or semester. It includes objectives for content or skills to be learned, a sequence for addressing the objectives, and materials of resources to use in the lessons. It also includes a recommended sequence for covering the material. Great. So now, onto the next slide. So now that I’ve given you sort of a quick overview of what the tool is, what sort of purpose it serves, I want to spend a little bit of time going inside the tool to help you sort of see what it looks like, what are the key sort of components to it. So in the next slide, what you’ll see in the curriculum review tool is there are sort of four key dimensions to the tool. And these are four key dimensions that we really suggest that one should consider when thinking about reviewing and selecting curriculum. And so the four dimensions represent four key qualities of a financial education curriculum that need to be considered as part of your review process. The first is curriculum content. This refers to, you know does the curriculum address core knowledge and skills required in existing content standards for financial education? The next is does the curriculum provide support for effective teaching and for effective differentiating of instructions. The quality dimension refers to whether or not the curriculum provides information in a way that is accurate, unbiased, and well presented. And then the efficacy dimension speaks to whether or not there’s evidence that the curriculum works in helping students improve their financial knowledge skills and behaviors. So this is sort of the our key pieces of the tool. And then in the next slide, we sort of show you the overall framework of the tool because within each of the four dimensions that I just mentioned, you’ll see there will be a set of criteria indicators and questions. And so if you look at the green box on the left, those are the pieces you will find under each dimension. And we’ll see what this really looks like in the subsequent slides. One other thing I want to mention is that the way that the curriculum review tool is designed, you can sort of do the review on a computer or by printing it out. But if you use it on a computer, a lot of the fields are auto-calculated. So that part is easier if you’re using it on the computer. The next recommendation that we have if you are considering doing a review is to assemble a review committee, because by doing this, it’ll allow you to incorporate diverse perspectives and it’ll also help you to get a more full sort of understanding of to what extent the curriculum meets your needs. So ideally, we recommend that a committee should have individuals with some expertise in financial education, curriculum development, and research methodology. The research methodology piece is there because it will come in especially handy when you’re reviewing the curriculum on the efficacy component. And then of course, you also want to make sure that there are practitioners -- whether they are teachers or instructors -- who are going to be sort of implementing that curriculum in a classroom setting. You want to have their perspective in there as well. So now in the next slide, we’re going to go into the actual specific sort of dimensions. And I will provide a couple of example slides just to give you a sense of how it’s structured. But we won’t have time to go through all of it, since it is a pretty comprehensive tool. So the curriculum content refers to knowledge and skills covered by the curriculum. The content dimension is based on existing national and state financial education standards. So these were not things that were created by us necessarily. It was really us looking at state standards and national standards that already exist and from that sort of identifying sort of the six major content areas. And national standards that we looked at included the Council for Economic Education, Jump Start Coalition for Personal Finance, (BARE) Standards, The Financial Literacy and Education Commissions Framework, The Big Ideas Identified as the Money as you Learn Program, and the Program for International Student Assessment. So we looked at all of those five different sort of national standards and then in addition to that, we looked at nine state standards so that we can get a really good understanding of what is being required to be taught in schools so that when you’re doing this review, you have a sense of what topics or what content areas should be covered. And the one other caveat that I’ll add to this is for the content dimension, it’s organized across grade bands. Of course, the standards are not the same across, you know, elementary, middle, and high school. So there is a separate section for elementary school, separate section for middle school, and separate section for high school. So in this next slide what you’ll see is just one except of what the curriculum review tool looks like in the content dimension. And this one is for the elementary grade school band. So the criteria here is does the curriculum address grade level appropriate topics receiving and investing? And so if you’re doing this review, what you would do is you would answer the series of yes/no questions. And at the bottom of that, it’ll get sort of automatically tallied if you’re doing the review online and then you move onto the next section. And so, you would continue that until the end of the section and then you add up the score that you get and that will sort of give you a sense of how much of each component was met or not met. I’m going to skip the next slide just in the interest of time, but basically in this slide what you’re looking at is the content criterion for high school. So moving onto slide 22, now we’re going to talk about curriculum utility, which is the second dimension. Curriculum utility is defined as the supports for using the curriculum. This includes pedagogical guidance designed to promote strong and effective instruction. And so for example, you know, the swing set, this would help you answer is the curriculum easy to use and does it provide suggestions, activities, and assessments that are intended to support student’s learning of key knowledge, fields, and behaviors. So the next slide we have an example of what that looks like. And just so you can see, I, you know, clicked the yes or no to some of these. So the particular one we’re looking at is here is do materials allow teachers to easily plan and deliver financial education instruction to students and integrate lessons into other subjects, recognizing that in some cases, teachers may be in a position to have to incorporate the financial education lessons into an existing subject area. So this particular section helps you to determine that. I’m going to move onto the next slide. And here this is also looking at the utility dimension. One layer that I want to bring your attention to is there are some components that are dark green and other components that are light green. So there is sort of a meaning behind this. The dark green represent criteria that are essential or must have, if you will, when you’re doing a review because there’s strong evidence that they have a strong, positive impact on student learning. On the components that are light green are ones that we think are beneficial. They hold promise, but they may not necessarily be relevant or useful across the board for all reviewers. So we really make this distinction to - and this distinction is weighted. So the essential components have a greater weight and the beneficial components have a lighter weight. So they have different sort of degrees of significance applied to it. And part of the reason we did this is we wanted this tool to not only reflect what the current best practices are, but also be a little bit aspirational. So if you are a curriculum developer or a content provider and you want to know sort of what’s the next level, we think that this is sort of one way to think about that. Moving onto the next slide, now we’re looking at curriculum quality. So curriculum quality refers to whether or not the curriculum is accessible, whether it’s accurate, whether the information is presented in an objective or balanced way, and also whether the curriculum is presented in a way that’s visually appealing and conducive to learning. So we’ll look at the next slide. And here in this particular section the question here is are curriculum materials objective? And so within that criterion we have three components. So the first component is the materials differentiated between facts and interpretation and discuss differing viewpoints. And to determine whether or not the curriculum you’re looking at meets that, you would answer the yes/no questions to the right of it. And you would continue down. And because there are essential and beneficial components here, the tallying, you know, you tally both the essential and the beneficial at the bottom. And the next slide is just another example of this. Here is the visual appearance of the student materials conducive to learning. And so we have a series of yes/no questions that you would answer to determine that. Now moving onto the next dimension, and this is the final dimension, so we’ve gone over the first three -- content, utility, quality -- and now we’re going to talk about efficacy. The efficacy dimension refers to the impact of the curriculum on students as measured in high quality research studies. So for example, this section will help you to determine if this research study is strong, associated with the curriculum, and if the body of evidence is large or moderate. So one thing that is a little bit unique about this dimension, because for the first three dimensions, you’re really going to be looking at the curriculum material. This particular section is a little bit different because you will be searching for research studies associated with the curriculum. And the way that this particular section is structured is you really have to do it in a sequential manner because they build on each other, whereas some of the other sections, the other dimensions, you can if you don’t know the answer to one of the questions, you can skip it and come back to it later. Whereas this one, you really have to answer each question in order to move forward. And so the first example that you see here is the inclusion criteria. And you know, so this helps you determine if this study that you have for the particular curriculum is strong. And if the studies are determined to be strong, then you answer the remaining questions for the rest of the section. On the next slide, I wanted to provide this example on slide 30 because once you sort of complete the efficacy review, there will be a number of different sort of classifications available that there’s either strong evidence of efficacy, moderate evidence of efficacy, mixed evidence of efficacy, or limited evidence of efficacy or there’s just not enough information. And once you’ve completed the entire review, what you do as a reviewer is you complete the summary of finding sheet. That sort of provides a summary of what you found in each of the dimensions that we talked about. So not only are you saying in each dimension whether it was strong, moderate, or limited, but you can also sort of add notes about things that particularly jumped out to you or maybe particular gaps that you identified so that you can see. And then on the right hand side, I provided an example of what that might look like. So that’s sort of an overview of the curriculum review tool. A couple of things that I want to just highlight before we bring in the guest speakers is our primary goal with this tool is to help education decision makers better navigate the range of classroom curriculum and materials and resources that are available to them. As a secondary goal, we hope that the curriculum developers who use this tool have a resource that they can use to look beyond content standards and evaluate sort of the strengths and potential gaps of their product on some of the other dimensions, like utility and quality and efficacy. And for policy leaders, we really think that there is an opportunity here for those who are either in a position of developing policies around financial education or in a position of implementing existing policies. We really think that this is a resource that they can use to help them think about either what materials or what resources to recommend in the implementation of state requirements. And so now that I’ve gone over the curriculum review tool, I want to invite one of our guests speakers, Ray Martinez, to talk about some of the work that his organization, EverFi, has done. EverFi has used this curriculum review tool and he will be sharing with you some of the insights gained from having used the tool. So I will now turn it over to Ray. Great. Thank you Sunaena for that wonderful introduction. And you can go to the next slide, please. So just as a way of quick background for the group, we started EverFi eight years ago in an RV with a couple Mac Books and invested our life savings into our first online course, which focused on high school financial literacy. And our whole mission was to really leverage innovative technology to help teachers and schools and community based organizations scale and measure personal finance topics, particularly in low to moderate income communities. And so it was really important to us, regardless of zip code, that students and families could have access to unbiased financial education content. And if you go to the next slide, Sunaena, and so when we first started the company back in 2008, I was, you know, personally travelling all across the country, meeting with superintendents and teachers and curriculum directors. You know, at the time there were 13 states that required some type of financial education in order to graduate. And now that has grown to 42 states across the country. And there really were no best practices on how you would evaluate effective online instruction as it related to personal finance. And I think on a lot of levels, we were doing teachers and practitioners a disservice -- that if you were a career technical education teacher in Alabama, or you were a personal finance in economics teacher in Virginia, if you did a Google search for around personal finance, there’d be 17 million results that would pop up and, you know, thousands and hundreds of resources that were available. So I think we’re really thrilled that the CFPB is really putting a stake in the ground and really a yardstick by which we can measure progress. I mean, as we looked at this tool, this really is, as Sunaena said, an aspirational set of criteria that we hope will move the entire field forward as we think about the best ways to educate the millions of students every year that are graduating our high schools that are really underprepared to make a lot of these important decisions around saving, budgeting, financing higher education, and much more. And if you go to the next slide, Sunaena, what we did as an organization is we had our subject matter experts in our product team evaluate both our elementary school course and our high school course. And we really found the results very informative. And the analysis that we completed is really going to have a direct impact on our product roadmap, how we think about data and research. And it’s also going to inform the hundred practitioners in the field all across the country that are working very closely with curriculum directors in schools, and the financial institutions and foundations that are sponsoring their local community. So as we went through the four different criteria that Sunaena talked about, when we looked at content our curriculum addressed all the topics in an age appropriate manner -- things like earning, income, and careers, savings and investing, spending, borrowing, and credit, financial risk in an insurance. Quality was the same area where we met and exceeded, you know, all of the criteria. Is the content, is the online instruction accessible to students? Is it factually accurate? And we have gone in and looked at the (Kaplan) and the economic education and great work that they’ve done in terms of setting the standards, the work that Jump Start is doing. So we wanted to make sure that if you are going to put this tool in front of a teacher, you knew exactly how it would meet the standards and where it might live in the curriculum -- whether it be a civics class in North Carolina, whether it be an economics class in the State of California, the content was effective and visually appealing to students. And I think more importantly, as we surveyed students, they like it. And I think it’s tough to get high school students to agree on anything. I think they can find these topics pretty boring. So to present it through a medium that they understand is really critical. If you look at utility, we did not meet all of the standards in utility. Our course does contain assessments to help teacher assess mastery, and we also offer additional teacher resources to support instruction. However, the one area that we missed was really how the differentiated instruction could meet the needs of students with special education status as well as students with limited English proficiency. And I’ll talk about how we’re addressing those two areas in a few minutes. I think anecdotally we’ve heard from teachers that the online format really helps students with learning disabilities, because they can move at their own pace and it’s really a fail safe environment. And then if you move down to efficacy, you know, this is really an area where the CFPB is pushing the field to a new standard, which we think is a great thing. And we think there’s an opportunity with everybody that has joined this call today, with the CFPB, and with organizations that are really committed to this issue, to really move the field forward -- not only in terms of measuring financial knowledge and improvement on particular skills, but really to start moving the needle on outcomes. And if you move to the next slide Sunaena, we want to take a closer look at efficacy. So during the last school year, we had about 500,000 students complete our pre- and post- assessment in both of our courses. And on average, students increased their knowledge game by about 80%. We’ve also started to imbed attitudinal and behavioral surveys into the course and are starting to look at evidence where it’s having a positive impact on attitudes in some of the plan behaviors. We do not have a randomized control trial. And we recognize that this is a starting point. There is a large set of students and tens of thousands of schools that are going through the course. And we think we have a real opportunity to move the needle with all of your help. We recognize this is not enough and we plan to do a lot more. And then finally Sunaena if you go to the last slide, I want to talk very specifically about the course improvements and enhancements that we’re making. First and foremost, we want to support students with auditory and visual impairments. And so we’re developing a series of online and offline tools that will help teachers directly in the classroom -- vocabulary sheets and learning modules and transcripts. And then we also are developing our school-based courses that will be available in both English and Spanish. There will be a core curriculum that could be integrated into the classroom and then a companion app that students can take home because as Sunaena talked about, this information is being talked about at the dinner table. And so how can you really impact that dinner table conversation? As it relates to efficacy, we’re going to be starting with an implementation analysis. We think that’s really the foundation, since there are, you know, teachers and schools that are using and leveraging the technology in different ways. And there will be more to come. But you know Sunaena we have found this process, you know, very informative. Our team did a wonderful job and spent, you know, a few hours going through this analysis. And we think as we go in and start talking to curriculum directors in Clark County or in Duvall County, Florida, that this will be information that we share with them in those conversations. Great. Thank you, Ray and thanks for sharing your experiences and insights using the tool. It’s really exciting and encouraging for me to see sort of how this tool is guiding your thinking and helping you to sort of think about what’s next in your organization’s work. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us. Thank you. After having used the tool, was there anything, you know, really surprising or unexpected that you learned that maybe you weren’t anticipating? Well, you know, I think one of the interesting things that I found from both this tool and the policy guide that you all put together, you know, one of the things that I have the pleasure of doing is really travelling all across the country, working with schools and policy leaders. But I have been surprised at the number of state treasurers and attorney generals when you walk into a meeting and you’re having a conversation about financial education, how many of those folks actually have the tool on the desk when you’re meeting with them. And so I think what you’re starting to see as folks are evaluating what are effective tools, they really are looking at you all as a leader in this space. So that has been a surprise, that folks have these large, thick documents on the table, so. That’s wonderful. Thank you. And at this time I do want to acknowledge that we’ve gotten a couple of really great questions from our audiences, so I want you to know we are making note of them and we’ll kind of come to them after Laura Rosen speaks for a little bit. So just want to, you know, as you have questions feel free to share them with us using the Chat tool. We haven’t forgotten about you. And after Laura speaks, we’d like to open it up to participants, because I think there may be others on the call who are joining us, participants who have used the tool and may want to share their particular insights. So just wanted to acknowledge that. So I think at this time, I would like to invite Laura to talk a little bit about her work in Texas around K-12 financial education legislation. For those who may not be familiar about what policies you worked on in Texas, Laura, it would be great if you can sort of provide a quick overview of that. And then also, given your policy experience, talk a little bit about how maybe a tool like this can be instructive or useful for policy implementation and policy leaders. Certainly. Thank you for this opportunity to present. My organization, The Center for Public Policy Priorities, is a state policy advocacy organization working to advance policies to support low income families. I’ve been involved in the passage of, or the adoption of a few financial education standards in the state, and I thought I would talk about the most significant expansion of financial education curriculum in Texas. This happened back in 2011. And in Texas, we are one seven states that doesn’t have the common core standards. And so we do have a bit more flexibility on changing our standards, is my understanding. I’m not sure that states with common core would be able to do what we did in Texas. But essentially we had a lot of financial education content added to math in kindergarten through eighth grade. And this was the first time that financial education has been taught in math. And it’s a great fit for math because math is a tested subject, which makes it more likely that it will be taught. To just kind of comment on how I think the tool could be a resource for policy leaders and implementers, though I would reflect on my experience of working to pass the standards in Texas and then working to implement them and reflect on where I think in this process the tool could’ve been helpful. At the time, I was relatively new to this field of work. And my organization had never been involved in advancing or moving forward curriculum, so we didn’t really have expertise in this area. I think that this tool not only would it be helpful for policy leaders and implementers, but also for advocates trying to push these policies. What we did is we actually looked to our state affiliate of the Council on Economic Education, the Texas Council on Economic Education. Nearly every state has one of these groups. They’re in our states one of the primary groups that’s training teachers in Texas to teach financial education and economics as well as writing curriculum. Laura Ewing, their Executive Director, I believe is on this webinar and she really has more expertise than I do on writing curriculum and I think maybe she will chime in during the Q&A. There are several stages to getting financial education curriculum policy implemented in the classroom. I think that this tool could be helpful at multiple stages. So after the passage of a general policy, we need financial education in K-8 math, then the writing team of our state department of education writes the content standards and the board of education sets those standards, makes tweaks to them, and then adopts them. I think at that stage, when the board of education was looking at the content standards, we at the time shared the Jump Start national standards. I think today, now that there are few groups with different national standards, I could see this tool being helpful on the content side as it kind of synthesizes a few groups’ national standards. They found the national standards very helpful and actually they’re heavily reflected and included in the Texas curriculum standards. I think then the next stage is our state department of education, the Texas education agency, determines what curriculum will be used to teach the content standards. And so I think getting this tool in the hands of the staff of our Texas education agency could’ve been helpful determining what that curriculum would look like typically. They’re looking at textbooks and how textbooks are going to teach the content. We had less ability to influence that process, but I think that this tool would be very helpful there. And keep in mind in Texas, this financial education was new to math. And so the math writing teams, when they were -- and the department of education -- when they were looking at how to teach this curriculum, they’d never done this before and some of the staff don’t have the expertise, so I think that this tool could’ve been helpful for them. And then finally at the district level, the district is ultimately determining what curriculum teachers are using. A lot of times they may use the textbook, but also they will supplement with other curriculum. And these are math curriculum folks in Texas that are determining how to teach the standards. And this financial education is new to them. So I think this tool could have been helpful for them as well. I’m really happy now that groups have a tool like this, because I certainly would’ve used it at the time if it would’ve existed, groups like mine that are working to advance financial education state policy or local policy. I don’t know if I answered all of your questions. Was there… Yes, you did. Thank you, Laura. That was really helpful. And the thoughts that you shared was something that we were certainly thinking about when we were developing the tool. And just hearing that from somebody who is working on policies on the ground at the state level really encourages us to continue to go out and promote this tool to those stakeholders who may not necessarily think that this is a resource for them but really can be. So thank you for sharing that. I guess I have a couple of discussion questions for the participants before we open it up. I guess one question is, you know, are there particular aspects of the tool that you think would be most useful to your sort of respective stakeholders or domain? So I think Ray, when you talked about how you use the tool, it looked like you were sort of using sort of all four dimensions of the tool. Laura, I don’t know if there were like particular - maybe one or two dimensions that may be even more useful than others to policy implementers or policy makers. Yes. Sunaena, I really thought Laura had some excellent points on the policy side of this. You know, as we’ve thought about the tool and the four different criteria, I think we added in almost another criterion around implementation. So no matter how great you think your technology is or your content, at the end of the day how does information get to the people that need it the most -- which are teacher and students. And so we really think that this tool can inform our teachers in how do you win the hearts and minds of teachers as you’re asking them to implement a supplemental resource or a new curriculum into schedules that are really packed? And so, we wanted to go into school districts and say listen, this is a standard space tool that maps to the national council on economic education, their standards and Jump Start standards. It is free to you to use as a teacher. And then most importantly, your students are going to like it and it’s going to be related to standards that you have to teach anyway. So I think this tool is really going to help us have these conversations and then continue again at the end of the day to, you know, have teachers press play in the computer lab, because that’s really what matters at the end of the day. I think the other area where it’s going to help inform are the financial institutions that we talk with every day. So whether you’re a CRA director at a bank or a financial education at a credit union that’s focused on financial capability, you know, we’re seeing more and more institutions wanting to do more in a meaningful way. And we think measurements and data and outcomes are going to be really important. And I think this tool is really setting the standard for that. Yes, and there are a number of things I like about this tool. So I’ll just kind of go through them. They’re sort of different. The first is I really appreciate that the tool is evidence-based and how curriculum should be taught. I notice one criteria in the utility section was whether the curriculum connects with families about financial education. I think there’s a lot of focus on teaching kids in the classroom but forgetting about engaging parents, which we know are one of the most important factors in a child’s development of their financial skills. So I appreciated a lot of aspects of the utility section. For my organization, in addition to advocacy work, we actually are also implementing financial education curriculum. We have had some pilots going on to advance our strategy to connect saving accounts to the financial education curriculum. And I notice in the utility section that for groups like mine who are not curriculum experts per se -- we’re not like the Texas Council that knows exactly how to write curriculum, don’t have a background in teaching -- it can provide a really helpful framework for funders or new developers of curriculum for what should be included in the curriculum. A few examples of the feedback we’ve received from districts that I noticed were criteria were to specify how the curriculum aligns with the state content standards. Teachers are always looking for that connection. Another feedback we received in implementing our lessons was there was a criteria in the utility section about whether the curriculum addresses the needs of students with limited exposure to financial institutions. Yes. I think teaching financial education, I mean, money is a very sensitive topic and kids are coming from very different backgrounds. We got feedback from teachers our first go around with our curriculum when we weren’t as sensitive to this, that some kids have no experience with a bank. They only have experiencers with check cashers and payday (unintelligible) lenders. So being really sensitive to the background of students when writing the curriculum, I think I really appreciated that inclusion there. And finally in Texas there are a number of financial institutions that are helping our teachers teach our financial education curriculum. Sometimes, these folks going into the classroom may be bankers that don’t have teaching experience. So I do think that the utility section is particularly helpful for individuals to give them some tools in how to best teach the curriculum and make sure that what they are teaching is the most effective way to deliver the information. And Laura, I couldn’t agree more with your point about parents. You know, we just completed a survey of 500 parents. Nine out of ten of those parents, you know, felt that it was important to talk to their kids about personal finance, but yet only 43% of them feel prepared to have these conversations. So we couldn’t agree more that, you know, the school is one touchpoint but how you reach the entire family, how you reach those parents who themselves are making a lot of these decisions, and how can you educate them with content that’s relevant in real time. Great. Thank you so much for sharing those insights. So we are really right on time for the folks who may be familiar with a one-hour webinar. Just wanted to remind folks that this is going until 315, in part because we wanted to make sure that we had time for participants to share their questions and share their insights if they’ve looked at the tool or used the curriculum review tool. So I think this is a great sort of transition point for us to address some of the questions that we’ve gotten so far using the chat feature. But I think after - I’ll answer some of those questions and then I’ll ask the Operator to open it up to those who are participating who want to chime in by voice. Actually, what I’m going to do Sunaena is have the Operator open that now because it takes a little bit for them to queue up. So Operator, could you tell participants how to tee up a voice question? Certainly. At this time if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. Please unmute your phone and record your name clearly when prompted. Once again, to ask a question please press star 1. So while people who want to ask questions via the phone are pressing star 1 and talking to the Operator to get their lines unmuted, we will read a couple of the questions that have come in through -- whoops, sorry about that -- through the Q&A function here. Let’s see, the first one - this is a suggestion but I’ll see if Sunaena wants to comment. It says I think the tool is excellent. I would suggest that in the evaluation process that the K-2 ages group I guess be separate from grades 3-6 in the evaluation process. Sunaena did you have any thoughts on that? Yes, that’s a great question and that was actually a decision - that was a question that we really debated when we were developing the tool, because what we wanted to do was in the elementary grade band to separate early elementary from the sort of older elementary age group, because there are some key differences between those different age groups or grades. But one of the sort of challenges when we looked at the standards that exist is most standards are sort of created for elementary school grade band and there isn’t a distinction between lower elementary and upper elementary. And so based on that, we decided to keep it sort of general. But I think that is an important point and certainly something that requires much more exploration and also more research. But on that front, I think from CFPB’s perspective, on the earlier age groups we really think that there is a really special opportunity there to engage parents in sort of helping their children -- parents and caregivers, I should say -- are especially useful for the younger because at that stage, a lot of the things that you really want to be supporting are their executive functioning skills. And while that can be done in a financial capability context, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. And so I think that’s sort of our current perspective. But certainly I think if there was much more of a delineation on the content standards front, I think that is something that we would’ve wanted to do, but just weren’t able to because of the way standards were structured. Presumably someone using the tool could in their own mind sort of group those differently if they - I mean, they could use the tool… Yes, I think they differentiate themselves between those different levels. Certainly. I think that on the content dimension, that would be difficult. But on the other three dimensions, you certainly could. Okay. And just to follow up on one thing you said, we do have a whole separate, well part of our website called Money As You Grow that is devoted to helping parents talk to their kids about money and activities they can do with that. And so that is a page you may want to visit, for those of you who are looking at that topic. And it is grouped by different age groups as well. Yes. Okay. And I think the last webinar was on that topic, so you can also check out the whole webinar from… Thank you. Yes, you can hear an entire hour -- actually it was a little less than an hour because it was a quick one -- on the FinEx website there was a recording of that Money As You Grow webinar that will walk you through the different resources that are on there and some of the research behind it as well. That was our webinar last month, as a matter of fact. Let me ask one other question that came in here through the Q&A function. And again, just a quick note for those of you that want to ask voice questions, star 1, and I will turn to those in just a minute. Another question -- does this go through college age, the curriculum? Yes, so the tool itself is mainly intended for K-12 grades -- particularly the content dimension because that’s talking about what topics should be taught. But I do think the utility and quality and the efficacy components of the tool can be certainly relevant to what can be taught in a college setting. So while it’s not directly intended for college aged students, I think there are parts of the tool that you can use to review college curriculum. I just think the content section may be less relevant. Great. And let me just ask the Operator are there any questions via phone. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star 1. Our first question today is from Laura Ewing. Good afternoon. Actually, my question is really more just a compliment to you all. I think this is a very strong tool for educators, parents, curriculum people to use. In Texas, we look at I would say three of these characteristics. We just term them a little differently in terms of content, cognitive demands, and rigor. And that’s from our Texas Education Agency. And then Learning List is a company in Texas that also looks at those two plus context. I do like how you have broken some of those down into the different terminologies and that you have different criteria. What I find really particularly interesting is the efficacy and really looking at the research that has been done. I think that for many of us, those who are in the educational field, the difficulty is when it’s time to adopt materials, there may not be the research that is done up to that point, but I think that there could be research that is inclusive and the pedagogy used and that type of thing that would demonstrate that there are really quality types of materials, books, or whatever. What I really want to compliment you on also is that back in the day, we talked about teachers teaching. And now we talk about teaching and learning, and that is what your four steps are guiding people to look at, is are we actively seeing and witnessing learning going on, and are we offering the types of lessons that students are actively engaged? And what would be interesting is to see and to take this the next step in terms of long term what is going to happen with this movement of teaching financial literacy in terms of our economy, et cetera, being in a much more positive place. Great. Thank you, Laura, for sharing that. Before we - I’m going to read one other question here. We actually have several coming in, which is wonderful. But here’s a very straightforward one that people may be asking themselves. Remind us what is the URL for the curriculum tool? How do you get to it? I don’t know the URL off the top of my head. But if you go to consumerfinance.gov and then type curriculum review tool in the search function, you’ll find it there. Right. There’s also a youth financial education page that has all the different resources. Yes. The FinEx page, or the adult page, is as I mentioned before consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education which has all of the sort of adult-oriented financial education resources. We also have consumerfinance.gov/youth-financial-education. Both in need of catchier names perhaps, but that youth financial education page has this tool as well as a couple other resources… Yes state policy makers guide for K-12 education. So I encourage you to go there to find these tools as well. I can also - I see there’s another question that’s come in about potential opportunities for CFPB to maybe partner with the Jump Start clearinghouse to provide a score for each curriculum and sort of how beneficial that would be to practitioners. So with regard to that, this resource is listed as a Jump Start clearinghouse. I think one of the challenges with this curriculum, I think one of the things we don’t want to do is each reviewer using this curriculum review tool will be thinking about sort of the characteristics that are really specific to the students or the demographics or sort of their particular context. And so I don’t think it’s necessarily beneficial to have sort of a review of one curriculum from one person’s very specific perspective and to generalize that to everyone, because just recognizing that there really isn’t a one size fits all solution, or there isn’t going to be one curriculum that sort of meets everyone’s needs. And so given that perspective, we are not currently pursuing that approach because I don’t want to create defense that, you know, there is sort of one answer or one sort of, you know, one fit for everybody, because of the diversity of the types of students and the types of classrooms that really need to be met. So while I think this tool is really helpful because the review is being done by individuals -- and ideally individuals who are going to be doing the teaching -- they can really look at it from their particular lens and they may not be able to anticipate the whole range of different classroom settings that it could be taught in. So that’s sort of our perspective on that question. But thank you for raising that. I think there’s certainly an opportunity there to maybe lift elements of the tool and to be (baked) into the Jump Start clearinghouse. And if that’s something that, you know, Jump Start is interested in, we’d certainly be willing to help them do that. Great. I will read one more emailed question and we’ll go back to voice and then come back to email. And just this is a quick one -- is there a similar tool for reviewing adult curricula? The CFPB does not have such a tool. I don’t know if there’s other ones out there. Yes. We have only done that for the youth space at this point. Yes. And I’m not aware of there being a similar one. I think that said, I would say on the personal adult financial education side, I find that elements of the curriculum useful regardless of age. If one plans to use it. It would be a different set of questions, perhaps. But those four dimensions, I find for even someone not reviewing a curriculum, it’s useful to think about those pieces of one’s program or one lesson or whatever one is doing. I think it’s actually a nice contribution. Yes, like the quality and the efficacy dimensions I think is relevant no matter what age group you’re talking about because it’s looking at is it accurate? Is it biased or presenting sort of a balanced perspective? And then the efficacy, you know, is there evidence to sort of suggest impact on students receiving that teaching? So, you know, I think like Irene said, parts of this tool is evergreen and can be used in a variety of settings, not just K-12 classroom. Great. Now let’s see if there are more questions on the phone. Operator, do we have any additional questions? I’m showing no further questions at this time. Okay. And again, it’s star 1 if anybody wants to ask a voice question. I have a couple more questions here that have been sent in via the Q&A function. First, how does the high school financial planning program match up with your tool? Since it’s a national curriculum, has someone used the tool to review that? Yes, that’s a good question. So what we’ve done is we’ve created this tool and we published it and put it out there and we are continuing to sort of actively promote it so more people in organizations use this tool. We are not, however, actively going around and reviewing other people’s tools. And I think this sort of continues to go back to the question of well, it depends on what type of classroom or what types of students you are trying to teach. And because there isn’t sort of this one size fits all approach, we are not sort of taking that approach. But if NEFE, the high school financial planning program, if they wish to use this tool, they certainly have the resources, you know, they have this tool available to them to use it. And if organizations wish to share the results of their tool in a similar way that EverFi has done, you know, they are certainly sort of welcome to do that. But we ourselves are not actively going out there reviewing other people’s tools. We have one other comment that was emailed in about another online curriculum assessment tool called Quality Matters. It could be applied to evaluating financial education curriculum and I’m not familiar with that. Yes. I’m not familiar with that particular one, either. But I can tell you when we were developing this tool, we did look at other existing curriculum tools that are out there in other subject areas. So Equip and IMET were the two that we looked at. And those are common core state standards affiliated. And then the CDC has a tool that they publish called the PECAT. And that is a tool for physical educators to help them ensure that they are not only sort of meeting standards, but are also sort of presenting the information in accessible ways. And so we looked at all of those types of models that are out there and lifted sort of parts of it that we thought that would be particularly beneficial in this tool so that, you know, we can sort of incorporate some of the best thinking from other fields and other arenas. Great. And here is a comment and a question. As someone who helps district curriculum directors explore EverFi financial education programs and determine if they’re a good fit for their school, what are some simple bullet points for how I can use this tool to show that it - no, our use of the tool shows that it is an effective or a well vetted tool. Yes, I mean so I think the tool itself, when you download it, it’s designed to be as simple as it possibly can be. And so if you were to do a review of a curriculum, what you’re really going to be doing is looking at the material of that curriculum and you’re going to be answering a series of yes/no questions and after the end of each dimension, you’ll have a score that sort of summarizes how many of the criteria were met and how many were not met. And then at the end of that review, you’ll have a pretty nuanced mixture of, you know, this curriculum is particularly strong let’s say in the content dimension and the utility dimension, but the quality dimension there were some deficiencies or, you know, some gaps. And so by using the tool, which is already pretty user friendly, you will sort of get that answer. And I really don’t think to do this, you don’t necessarily have to have a, you know, curriculum specialist background. But certainly, if you have that background it can help, but really we tried to make is as user friendly as possible and as direct as possible. Great. Operator, are there any other voice questions at this time? I’m showing no further questions, ma’am. Great. And I think we have addressed most or all of the emailed questions. So unless any other questions, if someone types in really quickly, or types star 1 really quickly, we are actually almost at time here. Yes. So this is great. So I just want to thank Sunaena and Ray and Laura as well for speaking on the webinar. I think this was a really interesting topic and as I said, while CFPB FinEx primarily deals with adults, I think one, there’s a lot of crossover between people working with different age levels, and two, I think some elements of this are actually very useful in the adult space as well. Those four dimensions and a lot of the kind of content questions and things I think are things that can be useful for anyone. So I really appreciate you guys doing this webinar. I hope this has been useful to all the folks on the phone. And I do encourage people to, if you haven’t signed up for FinEx and are interested in getting focuses a little more on the adult than K-12. But if you’re interested, CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. Everything we’ve discussed today, the curriculum review tool and other resources that came up that are from the Bureau are on our website, consumerfinance.gov under the adult financial education or youth financial education subpages. So we encourage everyone also to go there and find additional things that might be useful. This webinar will be posted. It usually takes a couple weeks before we actually get it sort of up on the website, but you’ll be able to access it and let others know who may be interested as well. So with that, I want to thank everyone for joining us. We had a great group on today. Thank you for having us. Great. And I think we are all done. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. And this does conclude today’s conference. You may disconnect at this time. END