Khara Persad: Hello! Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Economy Matters podcast. I'm Khara Persad. I work in Public Affairs, and I'm new to the team of hosts for this show, and I'm very excited. Did you know the Atlanta Fed has a whole department dedicated to economic education and financial literacy? In honor of Financial Literacy Month in April, I'm going to have a chat with two members of that team who can connect the dots for us about why our outreach programs that target teachers and students are a significant focus for the Sixth District. Sitting across from me are Amy Hennessy, director of outreach and economic education, and Princeton Williams, a senior outreach adviser. Welcome to the podcast.
Amy Hennessy: Thank you, Khara.
Princeton Williams: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Hennessy: We're excited to be here.
The Atlanta Fed's Princeton Williams and Amy Hennessy. Photo by David Fine
Persad: Thanks for joining me. Okay; so, Amy, we're going to start with you. Can you give, very quickly, an overview of what your department's economic outreach programs look like, and their objectives?
Hennessy: Sure—it's very simple. Our team of economic educators train K-12 teachers to teach the economic, personal finance, and career readiness standards that are in our state standards, as well as across the nation in the national voluntary standards.
Persad: That seems easy...or not?
Hennessy: We have a team of dedicated professional educators, and I would say they are passionate about education in general and helping educators. We employ a philosophy whereby we will multiply the impact of the trainings that we do with our educator stakeholders, because they will then be equipped to teach the thousands of students that they will reach.
Persad: Absolutely. So, Princeton, this is where you come in—and you have a hectic schedule because of this. Can you tell us how you engage with teachers, the places and people you're reaching, and the key topics that you teach?
Williams: Sure. We're recording this in February, in advance of Financial Literacy Month, and I was just thinking about what I'm doing this month—that, and the next couple of weeks. This week I was in LaGrange, Georgia, training high school personal finance and economics teachers on all the different topics that they teach in their class, from budgeting and credit, to how to measure the economy with GDP and unemployment rates. Tonight, I'm doing a webinar for the Minnesota Council on Economic Education, one of our partners in the Ninth District. Tomorrow, I've got almost 65 teachers coming to the Bank for a program on economic history. Next week, I'm doing that program that I did in Troup County, up in Villa Rica, in Rome in North Georgia; and then I'm going south to Florida to a conference of university professors, helping them use Fed data in their classroom to communicate about inflation and the dual mandate. The week after that, I'm doing Forsyth for world history teachers, and then up to Minnesota for the Council on Social Studies to train elementary teachers—so, all over the map, and all over the country.
Persad: So what I'm hearing you say is you're very busy.
Williams: I am fairly busy.
Hennessy: He is very much in demand. He does a really good job.
Persad: So, I'm going to skip to a question I had in my back pocket for you guys, because it's something you brought up, and I'd love to hear from both of you. There are many adults today—mostly millennials—who have this feeling like there are some things we learned in school that are not as helpful today as they could be. I don't want to give examples, but let's say, there are adults who wonder, "Why didn't I learn how to do my taxes? Why didn't I learn how to do things like this, because that's what I need now to be successful?" So, you mentioned budgeting and credit, things like that you're teaching. Do you feel like we are preparing a whole new generation to be potentially more successful when it comes to economics, and things that are more helpful?
Hennessy: I think my take is—and I would be interested to hear Princeton's take on this— but you're teaching muscle memory; so, you help students, and that's why we do it K-12, and there are standards around these core concepts, K-12. You're teaching fundamental academic language, making it accessible, helping them to understand and conceptualize so that they can strengthen their knowledge base. Then, through pedagogy, through active learning lessons and so forth, you're helping teachers to help students make connections from a practical application standpoint. So, in all honesty, an eighth grade student who may be learning some of the basics around budgeting, may not actually have to do the kind of budgeting that we all are doing as adults, or that we all should be doing as adults. But if they get that knowledge base and they build upon it, I think we're helping set them up for success as adults.
Williams: That is what we're doing. We're helping them develop these thinking skills, these critical thinking skills. One of my favorite lessons is using a decision-making model called PACED: you state a problem, you identify the alternatives, you establish criteria, you evaluate the alternatives based on the criteria, and then you make a decision. I teach it using pretzels. You have three different kinds of pretzels, and you have to identify the very best, most important criteria for judging which pretzel is best. But you know, once you learn that method of making a decision in an analytical and thoughtful way—"rational decision making" is what we call it in economics—once you learn those steps, you can apply it to everything, from where to go to dinner as a family, where to go on vacation, how to pick a college. I always debrief that activity with explaining my son's college choices, and what was important to him. But then in the eighth grade Georgia history workshop, I use it to evaluate the different locations that Georgia has had for a state capital, and how do you compare Savannah and Milledgeville and Atlanta? So, those decision-making skills, that process of making a rational decision, can apply to economics and citizenry and a breadth—we're giving kids skills to live their life as an active and engaged participant in this economy.
Hennessy: Yes, we're all consumers. We all are savers, ideally. We all are going to be engaged citizens. Many of us are going to be entrepreneurs, and so through these active learning lessons, through these workshops that we do with educators, we're hoping to equip them to help their students be the best consumers and savers and, ultimately, decision-makers.
Persad: Absolutely. I remember when I got my first job, I bought a little notebook and wrote things down to keep track of how I was spending my money, because I felt I was being—
Hennessy: That's great!
Persad: I don't know if it helped any, but I knew I was spending a lot.
Williams: That's amazing.
Hennessy: I think that's really—I would imagine it's helped you.
Persad: It did, because I saw I was buying stuff I didn't need.
Hennessy: Yes, there's a famous spending tracker in the Dallas Fed's "building wealth" lesson, early on, that does just that. Teachers can ask students to do it for a month, or for a week, and do exactly that—and it's surprising what you come back with.
Persad: Absolutely. So, I think we touched on the benefits. Is there anything you want to add to that, Amy, like the benefits of this type of outreach?
Hennessy: We are also very committed—every single member of my team, and honestly, you're my colleague in Public Affairs, and we're being recorded by our other colleagues in Public Affairs—we're all committed public servants. I sincerely believe that everybody I work with takes that mission as a public servant to heart. And so, obviously, another aspect of this is we are connecting with the community that we serve as public servants on behalf of the United States central bank. That's a really important outreach function. I think there's just so much goodwill that is always with us as we are doing these programs, and we have long-standing relationships with the educators that we train. We reach new educators all the time, but we have longstanding, deep relationships with educators. We are building trust, and it is essential in the work that we do on behalf of the central bank that the public trusts us and understands our mission. So, a lot of what we do is help educators understand the work of the central bank, and how the work of the central bank impacts all of our lives in ways that people generally don't understand. I would add that, and I'm sure Princeton maybe has something to add.
Williams: Yes. I think at the Fed, central to our work is our dual mission of maximum employment and stable prices, but how—as a 16-year-old who's going to be entering the workforce—how do you make the most productive worker that you can? Well, you're more productive and you're more ready to engage in this economy if you know how it works, and you know how your own personal economy works, and you know how the big, broad American economy and global economy works. And that's what we're helping teachers get down to those kids, when we do a lesson on measuring the unemployment rates. I've been teaching long enough that I used to say "reading in the newspaper," but I guess it's on an app now. When they see the unemployment rate, I'd like them to actually know what that means, and I'd like for them to understand how that could impact their own personal life and the country's life.
Persad: Can you give an example, Princeton, of a time you were doing one of these with teachers and you saw the light bulb go off?
Williams: I remember one guy in a workshop, who had been teaching a while, and he said, "I get this supply and demand thing now, I guess I should start teaching it"—and he had been teaching more than a few years of economics. The old joke is, "how do you make an economist out of a parrot? you teach the parrot to say ‘supply and demand,'" and I'm like, "how can you have taught economics and not know?" But that example just goes on and on. It's a teacher that understands one of these really challenging economics concepts, or understands better how to communicate a personal finance topic with empathy and without judgment—giving them the tools to engage with their students is just powerful.
Hennessy: Yes, I would agree.
Persad: When it relates to the Bank and what the Bank does, do you have to start from there to explain, "This is what the Fed does?" Some people may not have a concept of—
Williams: Oh, sure.
Hennessy: I'll say—I know you've experienced it—oftentimes the standards really lean into the monetary policy part of the Fed's function, and the dual mandate, and the tools of monetary policy, and so forth. And there's been less emphasis on the other core functions that the Fed is tasked with. And I'll say, Princeton was recently involved here in Georgia in helping to update the mandated course in economics and personal finance, and part of his input was to expand that out to have a better understanding. And he's written a really great new lesson on payments and all the different payment methods and so forth, and it's active learning and so forth. And talk about an area that has evolved over time, and just how much that affects all of us all the time, and—getting back to your decision-making—the decisions around what payment methods are you going to use, and so forth. It's just changed so dramatically. So yes, I would say.
Williams: I think that, following on that: you mentioned tracking your expenses in a little notebook, and that's amazing and that's a foundational step. But the world is just evolving and becoming more and more difficult to navigate, and we need to help teachers—not only, like Amy mentioned, the pedagogy, but also just the information.
Hennessy: The accuracy of the information.
Williams: The accuracy that, if you have a digital wallet and you tap your phone, you need to be conscious of whether or not you're using a debit card or a credit card. There was a time when the biggest thing that we had to teach in payments was the difference between a debit card and a credit card—and now we have online payments and bill pays, and just this world of options.
Persad: I could pay with my watch.
Williams: You can pay with your watch, but you have to know what that means. When you tap your watch, how are you actually paying, and what cost and benefits are you accruing when you use that branded technology that we all carry in our pockets and wear on our wrists?
Hennessy: Yes. We were talking, as we knew we were going to have this conversation with you, and based on one of the questions I was reflecting: When I started teaching in the mid-'80s, debit cards weren't even an option for payments. Most payments were still just checks and cash. Now, to the lesson that we just taught, that he was just describing: the evolution is really kind of mind-altering, in a way, and teachers are tasked with keeping up with all of those changes, and to help their students really navigate effectively. And so that's where I think we can provide support, because not only do we provide the support of helping with the trainings, but we develop—like I said, Princeton develops a new lesson that's applicable, that really will have real world applications for their students to help their students navigate that.
Williams: You mentioned millennials. My son is younger than a millennial. He's a Gen Z, and he is terribly frustrated that he has to pay his landlord with a paper check, because he thinks that's—
Persad: With a what? [laughter]
Williams: I know. But it turns out that the woman who owns his building still wants a paper check, and even though he was quite sure that he would never in a million years need to write a paper check, it turns out that he has to write a paper check once a month, and put it in an envelope with a stamp, and mail it to her house. So it's all about the fact that this world is building on, there's all the old that's still there, and then all the new that's on top. It's just increasingly complex.
Persad: Do you think there could ever be a time where a future generation wouldn't know what cash looks like?
Hennessy: We get asked that a lot.
Williams: We do.
Hennessy: We get asked all the time, "Are we about to be cashless?" And I say no, and we've got great studies, a team that researches all of this and evaluates that. I suppose, a hundred years from now—maybe? I don't think so. I'm an old lady, so I don't think in my lifetime; but I don't know. I would think Claire Greene and members of the Retail Payments Risk Forum team should come in, and you should have them on to talk about that, because it would be really interesting to hear. [Editor's note: We did just that here and here.]
Williams: But I'll say that I just updated some stats in one of my presentations, and the demand for cash goes up every year. The quantity of cash that the Federal Reserve issues as Federal Reserve notes goes up every year, so we haven't seen a downhill. We've seen changes, but we haven't seen cash disappear.
Hennessy: Not like checks—not like the paper checks.
Williams: No. Checks have disappeared.
Persad: I love when children, like my daughter when she sees a coin, and she's excited about a coin—you know, like, "Mommy—money!" I'm like, "Yes, we're rich." Okay, so let's touch on the curriculum a little bit, because we were talking about how things are going to change. Do you have any plans, or do you see in the future of the curriculum, anything new?
Williams: We have a couple of things. We're always developing new resources to address topics. So, payments are something that we're interested in and communicating about—and also, teachers need new resources. So we're always assessing the needs for what's out there, but we have a really exciting project that has been going on for several years now, in partnership with the Philadelphia Fed and the St. Louis Fed, where we developed a set of lessons for elementary, middle, and high school, that we taught a cohort of teachers how to teach them. We trained them, they taught it, we assessed their students before and after. And now we're into the second phase of that, where we're training more teachers on that, and using those lessons as a basis—call it "Federal Reserve economic fundamentals"—and those lessons are being used really across the country, as we expand the reach of our work to help teachers use those classroom-tested, research-based, active learning. We talk a lot about active learning, and maybe we need to think about that. But those lessons are going out across the country. One of the things about that, active learning is a real commitment on our part, and Amy's been doing this right alongside me for all these years. We really believe that kids should be doing the economics, so rather than telling them that they have to choose a payment method, for instance—we've been talking about the payment lesson—they're holding a card and they say, "I've got cash." "Well, can you use cash to buy a snack inside of a gas station?" Well, move to that side of the room. "Can you use cash to buy gas at the pump?" Well, no, you can't, so you have to move to the other side. So, they're analyzing and thinking and moving. That's part of this active learning school of thought that's really been a hallmark of our discipline for a number of years.
Hennessy: Well, I would add that when we were doing this pilot project with this cohort of teachers, it just so happened we were set to train them in the summer of 2020. We were asked to go home for a couple weeks and work from home on March 12, and we all didn't return to the office for two years. So that pushed our training off and we did the training in the summer of 2022. These educators had been, many of them, having to teach their students for a year virtually, and there was still this emphasis on everything being online learning, video modules, quizzing, and so forth. And we heard in all of the focus groups and the one-on-one interviews and the feedback that was provided by everybody in the cohort, that the students were eager to come in on the days that they knew that they were going to get one of these market simulation activities, or evaluating entrepreneurship and what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and so forth. And that was a testament, in essence, to this belief that we do a mix. There is a place for online pedagogy, but there's also a real strong hewing to what—like I said, back in the 1980s, I was doing a market lesson and that same market lesson works for teachers in 2025, just like it did with my students back in the mid-'80s.
Williams: One of the roles of our program, I would say, is helping teachers get comfortable with that, because it's a little crazy when you've got a room full of 8-year-olds, or 18-year-olds, and you set them out to do this task and they're determining the outcome. And that's what makes it real, but that's what makes it really scary. Amy and I were both teachers, and it's scary to put kids out there, and they're moving around and they're talking, and it's not like everybody at their desk with their head down. They're doing it, but teachers have to get comfortable, so the workshops that I'm doing all over the state are the ones where they're up and learning these lessons. They have to learn how to do it. The procedure documents are long and sometimes a little intimidating—and somewhat tedious, if I'm really honest about it—but they give the book. They tell you how to do it. But man, when those teachers see it happen, and they experience the lesson, then they're willing to go back and do it in their classroom.
Hennessy: And that was my professional experience as an educator for 24 years before coming here to be an ed specialist, was exactly what he said. I would go to a workshop, and I would do this activity, and I would be like, "I can now go back in my classroom, and I can do this with my students." Persad: So, what do you think of the ripple effects of what you do with teachers? What do you feel? Do you feel proud, do you feel excited, to reach these kids?
Williams: Oh, absolutely. I see it most often in the teachers. We hosted an Economics Teacher of the Year luncheon here, in partnership with the Georgia Council on Economic Education, one of our very best partners, and they had a video of their teacher of the year, and they'd gone to his classroom to watch him interact with the students, and he was doing a lesson that I wrote when I was at the Dallas Fed. All these years later, he was using the lesson that I wrote, and it was the lesson that he picked to showcase his...somehow, I did some tiny part of empowering him to show what he thought was his very best teaching.
Hennessy: Yes. Educators are amazing individuals, and it's a blessing that we get to work with them.
Williams: Absolutely.
Persad: So, I would ask both of you now: To the teachers who are listening right now who have never experienced this relationship with the Fed and this outreach program, what would you say to them, to the teachers listening, on why they should reach out and have us come to their classrooms?
Williams: It'll change your life. I mean, come and see it. One of the things that's great about working for the Fed is that we are privileged to get to treat teachers as the incredible professionals that we are. So, we have officers and leadership that advocate for me to be able to feed the 65 teachers that are going to be here tomorrow. We'll feed them breakfast and lunch, and they'll be here for a full day—and that may not sound like a lot, but to a classroom teacher that gets to sit down and eat a real lunch, and they don't have to go pick up kids from the lunchroom or anything like that, or they're not hosting a student council meeting in their room during lunch while they scarf down a frozen entrée—just treating them like that, and that's a privilege here. But they always get back on the evaluations that it's all about the lessons, that "I know I can do this now."
Hennessy: Yes. And they would recommend it to a colleague. That's a huge—the "net promoter" score, ours is very high. I think it's a testament. And it's not just a "one and done." We build relationships with them. That's the goal, is to help them and to support them, and to respect them and treat them with the dignity that they're due as professionals.
Persad: And I know there's a way they can reach out.
Hennessy: Yes.
Williams: Absolutely.
Persad: Do you have it?
Williams: It is on our website. A general email box where you could get to someone at our whole team is publication.orders@atl.frb.org—that's a general mailbox that could get to any of us, but also on atlantafed.org/education, there's a button to contact any member of our team, across the district.
Hennessy: Well, and I would just like to say: we view ourselves as Federal Reserve education 
. We do this in concert with colleagues across the Federal Reserve system, across the nation. We all are passionate about this work.
Persad: I can tell. So let's wrap things up. Can you just share what keeps you energized about what you do? I can tell you already, I feel like, Amy, you answered this a little bit in the beginning—but just a quick, one sentence.
Hennessy: Teachers make such a difference in the lives of their students. We get to support them.
Williams: Wow. Now, that's...I have to follow that. I second that, and I just—once again, it's just a privilege to work for an institution that recognizes the importance of that work. That keeps me going, and I view my work as a trust—a sacred trust—that I do the very best thing that I can for teachers on behalf of this institution.
Persad: Well, I've learned so much from this chat, I think I might benefit from sitting in on a class. Can you teach me the pretzel?
Williams: Absolutely, anytime.
Persad: I don't know what that is, but I want to know. Thank you both for your insights. And to our listeners—there's so much more you can learn about the Sixth District's work on atlantafed.org. Economy Matters is a helpful resource I hope you will consider adding to your favorites, or sharing with a friend. Thank you for your time and attention, and let's meet again next month.