Tom Heintjes: Hello and welcome to yet another Business Matters season. I’m Tom Heintjes, managing director of the Atlanta Fed’s Economy Matters newspaper. Since April is Financial Literacy Month, the Atlanta Fed makes a significant referral efforts to students and teachers to advance financial education., I thought it would be a great time to sit down and speak with Jackie Morgan, a senior outreach director on the Atlanta Fed’s financial education group. Hello, Jackie, to the audio.
Jackie Morgan: Owing for having me.
Heintjes: Jackie, I wanted to know how the economic training system works for K-12 students in the Sixth District. I know you reach students in school through 12th, correct?
Morgan: Yes, we do. We work with K-12 people, and then also some tertiary people. We collaborate with a lot of teachers who are currently receiving instruction to make them more adept at teaching as well. So the scenery here in the Southeast—we’ve made a lot of leaps. In many cases, the criteria taught in the various claims include both personal finance and economics. I’m in Tennessee— I’m out of our Nashville Branch—and in Tennessee, we have required training in both economy and personal finance. In both of those, we offer record programs. In Georgia, it’s a combination of having both economy and personal finance in the same category. And finally, in Mississippi, a condition that was incorporated into their course on college and career readiness, was introduced. So all three of those claims have it currently in place, but the good news is that in the rest of our district, we’re going to see some issues coming in the near future. This year, Florida will require specific fund, which was just mandated. Alabama simply passed it, and it’s going to be part of a seventh-grade training related to job planning. Additionally, Louisiana will have it for high school students starting in 2026-27. Therefore, lots of exercise for both econ and individual finance—more on the individual finance side. Additionally, we even notice some requirements that are embedded throughout the different classes in elementary and middle school, not necessarily standalone programs. You might see it in teaching algebra, or in teaching social studies, you may discover a piece for accounting and personal financing as part of those standards.
Heintjes, I have a lot of questions I want to request you on, but first, let’s take a step back. I want to request you how the Fed originally got involved in financial and economic training. How did that come to get?
Morgan: We’ll taking a quick move up to the ’70s. Arthur Burns, the head of the Board of Governors, did it in 1976. had a visit to the rulers and the president of the Reserve Banks to explain the need to inform the public about the job of the Fed. And so it developed once more. From there, there was a plan to truly build common information, and that’s how many of our common knowledge agencies evolved across the Fed since also. They were actually charged with educating buyers, dispelling myths, and helping the people understand the Fed much. And therefore, growing out of that next came monetary education. There are many different approaches to see it across the Fed; there is no one approach that it is done in each of our distinct regions. Our concept here in the Sixth District, we formalized back in 2004. Our focus is on instructors, but we also believe that by adopting a comprehensive approach, we can have well-trained educators who can then transfer that knowledge to students over the course of a time and have that multiplier effect.
Heintjes: So this is certainly a lengthy-term work that you men have undertaken. And how has the Atlanta Fed changed as you have worked in training and teacher engagement? Naturally, the payments system has undergone huge shifts, for instance. Do changes like this affect how educators approach financial literacy, or are there fundamental ideas like compound interest that do not change over time?
Morgan: Of course, there are going to be some items that are the same—interest is attention. For instance, I actually started in payments earlier in my Fed job. And therefore, thinking about search reading, as we take a step back, assess writing is a little different now than it was back in 1999 and 2000. If we were still operating in the manner we were then, our evolution and ability to make use of all the online tools available today have truly had an impact on both our education system and payments. We’ve seen that development, and it’s been wonderful. However, teachers are now required to consider teaching on checks as a training tool in addition to things like cryptocurrency and other online payment tools because it is still used as a payment method. But, they’re having to actually stay on top of it, those who are teaching about the content problem.
Heintjes, you naturally have a lot of passion for your work and financial education. I want to request you what led you to be interested in financial education and financial education. Was it a particular circumstance that led you to choose this career path?
Morgan: Yes. Often it’s about being present at the right time. I started with the Fed again in 1999 and found my career when work had really come online. It acted like a brand-new, amazing invention. When I started with the Fed, I was working in payment method, and my history was in company economy and people connections. When I first started working in this area, again in 2004, I said,” Man, that sounds like fun. That kind of married all of my impulses up”. Moving over and getting more deeply into this field and becoming very involved in the personal finance knowledge in Tennessee was a good match for me.
Heintjes: I want to ask you about the epidemic, and going to remote studying for an extended period, which somebody had to do in that moment. What impact did that have on economic education? I know a lot of tests show that kids backslid in public as a result of that time. Does that apply to the industry in which you work? And how can any lost floor be made up, if in truth it can be made up?
Morgan: Yes, I believe that any form of education, including economic education, was severely underwhelming. I think we can use the superbug as a learning time as well, and to think about as we’re helping students to prepare for the future. This use that as a catalyst to consider how do we get ready for the future, even though we may have experienced that terrible moment in time. Using the crisis to tell about things like disaster money, and making tough decisions, and changes in our lives, as it applies to learning—students are usually tenacious, but it was hard on them politically, too. And so, considering how that relates to what their work and what they were seeing with their families as well as have an effect on how they view monetary education. I often feel like issues are kind of a pendulum. We are on the opposite end of the spectrum, in my opinion, when the market is strong and people work hard and things are going well. But when they see it swing the other way and we’re having problems, and their families are having problems or losing work of kids—or losing a parent, which can be a huge financial difficulty on the family—and therefore they view things a little bit different.
Heintjes, I am aware that your team also works with predominantly minority and underserved schools. Can you talk a bit about your efforts in that area, and maybe the associated challenges and opportunities?
Morgan: I believe there are always opportunities and challenges regardless of the audience you work with. And to better understand the underserved audiences that we work with, we do have a congressional mandate to work with schools that are majority- minority—at least 51 percent minority—or all- girls schools. And so we make sure we’re reaching those and other underserved populations as well as by strategically looking at and making sure we’re doing it. That can look a little bit different. That might entail holding teacher trainings in those areas for some of those educators. It might mean bringing a school group in to get some career or personal finance training here as part of a day that they might be experiencing at the Fed for jobs. One of our team members frequently interacts with Native American communities, which suggests that we might be heading out. That’s another way that we can serve different communities—not only just those that are underserved, but to be sure that we’re serving all communities as well and reaching out to both urban and rural populations.
Heintjes: There is more I want to ask of you, but we’re going to pause for a moment so you can hear the Atlanta Fed’s message.
Heintjes: Welcome back. Jackie Morgan, who is on the Atlanta Fed’s economic education team, is the subject of our conversation. Jackie, I know I’m asking you to generalize here, so forgive me—but do young people see financial education as something that is truly important, or is it sort of an abstract concept for them?
Morgan: Like anything else, it depends. One of the things we find, though, about financial literacy is that it’s often” just in time” education for people. People frequently wait until they are ready to look up information on buying a home before acting on their own. They’re not going to look for that information 10 years in advance. Making sure that it’s relevant to what their interests are when we’re doing financial education with young people is crucial. If you’re working with a class of sophomores—16- year- olds—they’re thinking about car buying, or their next steps. They might be seniors or juniors and are considering what life will be like after high school. So making it relevant to them. I’ll share a fantastic tale from a teacher I work with. He had a young person come to him and say,” Gosh, I just do n’t know— I just do n’t think I can afford a car”. And the teacher responded to them,” Well, I see you with several Dr Peppers every day.” He said,” Let’s talk about this”. And this was a junior ROTC instructor who had this student for a number of years. They came up with a plan to help that student, over the course of three years, get that car—just by forgoing that consumption of that one drink per day.
Heintjes: To see a student come in feeling one way and leave feeling another way must be really satisfying as a teacher.
Morgan: Absolutely, yes. And I think it speaks to the impact that we can have as well, because we’re working with those educators to make sure they have what they need for knowledge and resources in the classroom. And then hearing those stories for us is also very impactful and rewarding.
Heintjes: That’s fantastic. We spoke before of the pandemic—it’s hard to talk about the pandemic and not talk about Zoom, which became a lifeline for so many people during that period. Has the ability to do things like Zoom or other platforms changed as a result? It used to be that everything was in person, but that limitation does not necessarily exist anymore.
Morgan: Yes. We take a hybrid approach these days, where we do some things in person and some things by Zoom. And in fact, before it became widely used, we were already producing a lot of Zoom and other Webex programs to appeal to a wider audience. When we bring educators in, we love that in- person impact and the things that we can do that are hands- on for learning and building those relationships. However, we find that we are unable to reach everyone with our limited resources.
Heintjes: And coming here requires resources that maybe not everyone has.
Absolutely correct, Morgan. And so, with Zoom and other platforms, we’re able to reach not only somebody who might be here in Atlanta or in Nashville, when I’m doing an in- person program, but it could be upper East Tennessee and all the way down to New Orleans where our office is, and all the entire district. It really made it easier for us to reach out to a wider spectrum of educators.
Heintjes: You spoke about resources, and I want to ask you, what resources does the Atlanta Fed—and other Reserve Banks, because we all do this—what resources do you offer to educators?
Morgan, we have a variety of infographics about personal finance and the economy. There are visual depictions of different topics, so if an educator is teaching about supply and demand, price ceilings, price floors, fiscal and monetary policy on the econ side, or maybe they’re teaching about taxes, or decision making, or saving and investing—we have posters and then activities and lessons that go along with those that they can order from us on our website at atlantafed. .org/education That way they can get those, and order those resources for their classroom, at no charge for them.
Heintjes: And I should take note that the website will include a link to those resources with this podcast episode. As you mentioned, you work with a team, and other Reserve Banks also have teams working in this space, but the demand is great. How do you choose how little time is available to you to accomplish the task as best you can?
Morgan: That is just a pure question on economics, is n’t it?
Heintjes: Yes, that’s appropriate.
Morgan: It’s all about scarcity and how each of our Reserve Banks has different priorities and has to figure out how they’re going to allocate those resources. And so, we’ve chosen how we’re going to approach reaching out within our teams, and that’s one of the reasons we decided to work with educators in a wholesale manner so that they have the tools they need to work with students, for lack of a better word. In each Reserve Bank, they take a little bit different approach, whether or not they actually have an economic education outreach program.
Heintjes: And you discuss best practices with your peers and possibly modify your approach accordingly?
Morgan: Yes, we do. Federal Reserve Education is a system-level organization., and we work collaboratively for outreach. So, they might see us at conferences held by that brand ( we’re at a lot of those ) or our website, federalreserveeducation, that was promoted during the commercial period. org. That’s a place where we have access to all of our resources. We also have online modules, there are books, online e- books, and we have lots of other lessons and activities—anything that an educator could want for teaching economics and personal finance, we likely have something to help support them in the classroom.
Heintjes: When you interact with and converse with economics teachers, do you frequently hear about areas of need, areas that they wish they could emphasize, and so on? Does that influence your team’s thinking about future efforts?
Morgan: Absolutely, yes. We do surveys with all of our programs to get feedback from educators so that we can be sure that we’re meeting their needs. We also ask them for suggestions for areas where they could improve. The one thing that seems to be common across all of these teachers is, so many economics and personal finance teachers are just so passionate about the subject matter they teach—which is really inspiring. When people first learn about us, they are often unaware of our resources and resources, and they are all so excited to be able to find and use those resources. One of the best experiences is, we were at the National Council for Economic Educationhad an exhibit booth there during the national conference. And before that, we had done some preconference sessions, met some great educators who then ended up bringing their peers and colleagues to our exhibit booth, and they did the sales pitch for us. Because they said,” These are great, they were out there telling them about all of our resources.” You need to know about these”. And that’s the best feeling when other educators can assist us in reaching out to others so that they can have these materials in their classrooms.
Heintjes: Yes, that’s got to be gratifying. You mentioned parents, so I’m hoping some of your students ‘ parents are listening to this episode. How can a parent learn if economics and personal finance are part of the standards and the graduation requirements of their children’s schools?
Morgan: Yes. One place to go to get an easy, quick view of things is the Council for Economic Education. One of the partners with whom we collaborate conducts a survey of the states where economics and personal finance are necessary for graduation. And they have a great visual, so at a snapshot, you can say,” Oh, my state does or does not require that”. From there, you can always go to your State Department of Education to check the course standards that match that specific requirement, whether it’s a graduation requirement or just a general, standard course that they choose to take as an elective. The other place you can always check is, often the school websites will include that information, or the course books that the students may have. There are so many places to look and check, and there are also many places to look and see what might be.
Heintjes: I wanted to ask you to look into your crystal ball and tell me: What’s on the horizon for you and your economic education colleagues?
Morgan: I believe you can rely on us to keep working with educators and be out there helping them, particularly with our career and technical educators. They do a lot of our college and career readiness, which we find is important as well and ties back into economic education. I see us continuing to be out there with our high- quality resources, our high- quality programs. You may see us continue to grow and adapt as we see how education evolves over the years.
Heintjes: That sounds like a great way forward. Jackie Morgan, senior outreach director with the Atlanta Fed’s economic education team, thanks for joining us.
Morgan: Thanks for having me.