Feducation Essay

• Introduction
• Taking the Fed Challenge
• The Fed Enters the Classroom
• "A Tremendous Resource for Teachers"
• Never Too Young to Learn
• Working Economics into the Classroom
• Saving Our Future: Economics and Personal Finance
• For more information

 

Taking the Fed Challenge

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in late January, while his classmates headed outdoors into the sunshine, Wu huddled in a classroom with five other students under the watchful eye of economics teacher Eva Johnston. Newspaper clippings were everywhere. Some of the students sat at computers, scrolling through web pages of economic data, while Wu and others used markers to add notes to an outline that already took up several pages of a giant flip pad.

It was a big day: In the final meeting conducted by outgoing Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) had just voted to again raise interest rates by one-quarter of a point, Wu and his classmates needed to decide what impact that action could have on the recommendation they would make if they were in the shoes of a monetary policymaker.They would be wearing those shoes in less than six weeks while they competed with other high school teams in the annual Fed Challenge event.

Fed Challenge, sponsored by the St. Louis Fed and other Reserve banks around the country, allows high school students to take part in a mock FOMC meeting. They make a 15-minute presentation to a panel of judges and then spend an additional 15 minutes being questioned on their findings and recommendations on monetary policy.

The team that wins the St. Louis district competition heads to the national finals in Washington, D.C., where Wu doesn’t need a tour guide. He and his classmates made the finals in each of his four years on the team, continuing Marquette’s nine-year winning streak in the Eighth District competition.

Four for four is nice, but Wu is looking even further into his future as he ponders his career aspirations. “I’m planning to major in economics,” he says. That’s a far cry from how he felt when he first joined the team as a freshman on the recommendation of his math teacher, whose classroom is next door to Johnston’s. “I really didn’t know anything about economics,” Wu says. “At the time, it was just something to do. There did come a point where I asked myself, ‘What am I getting into?’ Eventually, I built up my confidence.”

For every student like Charles Wu, however, there are many teenagers who won’t learn enough about economics to gain that confidence—or even to acquire the knowledge they need to become a savvy adult in today’s complex financial world. That fear—and the desire to make students like Wu the rule, rather than the exception—helps drive the passion of Dawn Griffitts, a former teacher who has managed the St. Louis Fed’s economic education programs for more than 10 years.

“The Fed has the knowledge and the means to teach others about economics, and we certainly have a comparative advantage in teaching about the role of the Fed in the economy,” says Griffitts. “If we don’t get out and talk about economics and the Federal Reserve, who will?”

In this annual report, Griffitts and her St. Louis Fed co-workers join with economic education experts, teachers and students to share their thoughts on Fed Challenge and the many other St. Louis Fed courses and programs that promote economic education—and why shaping today’s young minds is so critical to the Fed’s economic mission of tomorrow.

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