The 2017–2018 school year has been our busiest yet! Thank you to all our partners and supporters for another successful year.

We are excited to share with you the many milestones our program achieved, as well as our plans for the upcoming school year.

14,400 STUDENTS AND COUNTING

Our program hit record heights this school year, as we continue to grow and expand! In all, we served 68 schools, 87 teachers, and 4,735 students during the 2017–2018 school year—our most to date. We are also expanding to new locations, including cities in New York, Tennessee, and Central Illinois.

BRAND NEW CURRICULUM

Perhaps our biggest, most exciting update: We successfully wrote and field-tested the first version of our new curriculum! The curriculum is relevant, rigorous, research-based, and responsive to dynamic changes in the financial world. It is also enjoyable to teach, as it is rich with simulations and opportunities for discussion and reflection. We promise you have never seen anything like it!

Special thanks to our teachers who field-tested our curriculum and provided us with rich feedback. You can learn more about our engineering approach to curriculum design here, here, and here.

EXPANDED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

We also expanded our professional development offerings this year. We provided two days of in-person professional development, in addition to an online Professional Learning Course. The in-person professional development focused on the pedagogy of personal finance. 

Our professional development offerings are designed to increase confidence and content knowledge in teachers, as well as provide teachers with tools to develop positive financial behaviors in their students.

ALUMNI ADVISORY BOARD

We recently established an Alumni Advisory Board, comprised of ten alumni from our program. The Board helped us identify where financial education proves effective and helpful for students and where it falls short. The insights from the Board helped inform the new curriculum. You can learn more about what our Board had to say here.

TEAM CHALLENGE 2018

We took the annual Team Challenge to new heights this year! Over 400 students joined us at Navy Pier to participate in a day-long stock trading simulation and financial literacy competition. The top three teams earned up to $5,000 in grants for their school. Check out the social media recap from the event here.

ADVOCACY

We continue to advocate for a course on personal finance in every school. Specifically, we want to see every high school offering a single semester of personal finance instruction to their students. We recently pushed for the model at the Council for Economic Education in New York City.  You can read about why we so strongly believe in this model here.

LOOKING FORWARD

The 2018–2019 school year will be an exciting one for the team, as we prepare to publish our new curriculum. We’ll roll out the new curriculum in Winter 2019. We will also be developing and field-testing new digital tools, expanding our in-person professional development offerings, sharing our learnings at financial literacy conferences, and more. If you are interested in learning more about our work, please email financialeducation@uchicago.edu.

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