In Conversation With...

    ROBERT DUVALL, CEO OF NATIONAL COUNCIL ON
    ECONOMIC EDUCATION

As CEO of National Council on Economic Education (NCEE), a non-profit organization that promotes economic and financial literacy in schools, Robert Duvall is spokesman for the cause of making economic and financial education a core component of the pre-college curriculum. Duvall will speak at CFP Board's 2006 Annual Meeting on August, 4, 2006 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Read more about the meeting and register online.

Sarah Ball Teslik, CFP Board's CEO: Give me a very brief summary of NCEE's mission and the history of how you got that mission, because I think it's very interesting.

Robert Duvall: Yes, the NCEE was founded just about 60 years ago by a group of business leaders and educators associated with the Committee on Economic Development. They saw the GIs pouring back into the workforce after the second World War and realized that too many of them didn't have a clue about the American economic system they were going to be working in. So we were founded as a non-profit, non-partisan, independent organization with the mission of getting basic, practical economics into the core curriculum of our nation's schools. That continues to be our mission.

Then the question was, how do we do that? And some wise people figured out that the best way to get into the heads and hands of young people while they are in school is through their teachers. So the heart of our mission and method is professional development for teachers. We don't publish textbooks, but we do create curriculum, teacher guides, student activity books and so forth for different levels and in different subject areas.

After realizing that the best way to get the job done was to teach the teachers, next question was, how do you get to the teachers? We developed a unique nationwide network of state councils. We know that education decisions by and large are made on a state-by-state basis. Our state councils are charged with developing and supporting university-based centers where teachers can go for workshops and the continuing education credit that they need. So it's a neat delivery system. Last year nationwide, the NCEE and its network of state affiliates worked with over a thousand K-12 teachers who in turn taught about 7 million of our young people. When you teach a teacher, it's not just a one-time thing. That teacher has another group of students the next year and the year after that. It has what the economists like to call the multiplier effect. So our commitment is to getting into the heads and hands of young people so they are adequately prepared to handle the financial challenges of life. And possess a basic understanding of the American economic system.

SBT: It seems that NCEE is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, private bodies associated with financial education, and one of the largest. Has the content of the information you're trying to deliver always been related to personal finance? One of the debates going on is whether the economics taught in our schools is useful enough and if it gives the personal financial information people need in their personal lives.

RD: Our conviction is that every high school graduate in this country ought to have had some economics. And we don't mean just economics 101 at the university level. Too many people think that economics is what they do at MIT, not what you do when you're making decisions around the kitchen table.

SBT: Yes, exactly.

RD: And that's the type of practical, applied economics. We want young people to not only be taught but to get and be able to use concepts like supply and demand and the idea of opportunity cost. You are spending a half hour talking to me when you could be doing something worthwhile.

SBT: (laughs)

RD: The point of that is that we're constantly making decisions, so we like to talk about not just teaching economics, but teaching the economic way of thinking. Good decision-making skills.

SBT: So it can be applied by the average person who doesn't grow up to be a corporate executive.

RD: Absolutely. And the basic content has not changed much over the years. One of the things that concern me about the current focus on personal finance is that it's not enough to know how to open a checking account. You know that old adage - how can I be out of money, I still have checks - you have to have a broader framework of understanding and knowledge in order to make decisions. I gave a presentation recently and a person rather impatiently asked me, "Well, what are you doing to teach young people to avoid predatory lenders." Well, not a great deal, because it's hard to get the attention of a 15-year-old on the subject of predatory lending. What we're trying to do is teach them some basics so ten years later when they're buying their first home, they may not have the terminology, but they'll have the skill set to avoid predatory lenders.

SBT: They can at least spot the issues.

RD: We have a whole curriculum called Financial Fitness for Life which is the premier curriculum for personal finance in the country. It includes take-home materials for parents to help them talk to their kids about money. That's something I wish I'd been told about when I was growing up. Maybe I'd be able to figure out how to afford to live in New York.

SBT: My parents taught me to always spend less than my husband gave me. That was my financial upbringing.

RD: That has a number of presuppositions. Last spring Lou Harris conducted a poll for us. One of the questions asked to high school graduates and their parents was, "What is an annuity?" Forty percent of the respondents couldn't say. How are you going to talk about privatizing Social Security and managing your own retirement plan if you don't know what an annuity is?

SBT: The survey raises the question of how you measure success.

RD: We're getting more specific at analyzing results. I think there are three levels. The first level is basic data collection: how many teachers did you teach, how many students, where did they come from, were they underserved populations? We have pretty good data for all of that. The second level is to say alright, you know that forty students were in that middle school class that was given by a teacher who was in one of your workshops, but did they learn anything? Did they get it? We have test instruments, which because of the demand for assessment and evaluation are in greater and greater current use by school districts.

Then there's the third level where, frankly, the NCEE and everybody else, as far as I know, barely has a toe in the water at the edge of the sea. And that is figuring out how to measure changes in behavior. And that's one of the major questions the NCEE is trying to think through and address right now. I'm excited about it. I think we're going to be contributing to that discussion in a significant way. So we know the first two are measurable, are there teachers teaching and to whom, and are the students learning something. Then the third step, six months later, have they opened a checking account, are they saving part of their allowances? That's the kind of thing we're just figuring out how to measure.

SBT: That's tough. I think of the teachers that have influenced my life, and sometimes it's thirty or forty years later when something in the back of my head, something they taught me, makes me act differently. How do you capture that?

RD: I think you can capture some proxy, some interim steps, as you will.

SBT: There seem to be quite a few different groups that are involved in some piece of the financial literacy picture, and a fairly good sized amount of money has been divided up into different pots. If your life depended on getting Americans to be more effective in planning their financial futures, handling their financial futures, where are the gaps?

RD: I don't think there are great gaps in the material that is available. I think the challenge is in presenting that material in ways that engage young people today. We're doing two DVD projects right now that will be made available primarily to teachers, although they can be used by parents with home schooling and by organizations such as Boys and Girls clubs and so forth. They're done in an MTV style to get to the audience that grew up on Sesame Street, with its short colorful segments. So I think there's room for development in the delivery vehicles. And related to that, I think we've just begun to really see what we can do on the Internet.

SBT: Yes. It's a fabulous delivery vehicle when properly tapped.

RD: I think there's a lot more that can be done. Our traditional method is workshops with 15 teachers. With the Internet, we could have a Nobel laureate talking to 3,000 teachers in an interactive way.

SBT: That's something that wouldn't be cost-effective if you had to repeat it all across the country. It's something we've been thinking about - how to cost-effectively reach larger audiences in the media ways that they are now used to learning.

RD: I would re-work many of our materials in visual and current forms, do more on the Internet, and have a massive teacher education program. I would like to figure out strategically how to get into the schools of education because most of our work is in service for teachers, and if we could figure out a way to crack the schools of education and get to the teachers before they become teachers.

SBT: Plant the seed at the beginning. Let me ask you a last question. Given the job that you have, has it changed your own approach to financial decisions or the way you react to young people or kids?

RD: That's a great question, Sarah, and I can honestly say it's had an enormous impact on me. Dante's Inferno assigns punishment to sinners in accordance with their crimes. I know what's going to happen to me in eternity, and I'm going to be buried up to my neck in NCEE publications. And I'll have to listen to my own speeches over and over again and realize that in my life I didn't do enough of those things. I was only half-joking when I said maybe I could figure out how to live in New York City. But fortunately, it's not too late. I've learned a lot on the job, and it's helped. It's also helped me be a better parent.