December 8 was the last of a series of Department of Education events focused on the ESEA reauthorization and its breathtaking and ambitious reforms, goals and funding.  A key feature of the series was the opportunity for frank conversation between the invited audience and the public officials. The series addressed the whole continuum of student readiness, ending in the final session, fittingly, on College- and Career-Readiness: here's the transcript, and here's the video.

I had an opportunity to ask about the role of financial literacy in readiness and what commitments the Dept of Ed was making toward it (my moment in the conversation: 1:00:20 on the video), excerpted below.

MS. GRIFFIN:  My name is Kathy Griffin.  I'm a financial literacy educator and advocate.  I work especially with high school students, college students, college graduates.  My site is moneyu.com.  Financial literacy clearly is an essential piece of college and career readiness.  They need to have financial skills before they even take out the student loan, before they choose a major and a career, before they drop out because of debt, before loan repayment begins.

Young adults who are financially unskilled are not just unready, they're a social liability.  They're a threat to our economic stability.  So what is being done to help schools offer financial literacy instruction in schools now, in the near term, and in the future?

DEP. ASST. SEC. RITSCH:  Does anyone want to throw out anything you're familiar with along those lines?  Carmel?

MS. MARTIN:  There are several programs that the Department of Education has in our budget that relate to financial literacy.  Several programs that are about preparing children for college access specifically.  There were several provisions added to the Higher Education Act in the last Congress that puts obligations on high schools and college financial aid offices in terms of --

MS. GRIFFIN:  Lenders and college guidance counselors, right.  There are few teeth in that.

MS. MARTIN:  And TRIO and GEAR UP are two funding sources that fund financial literacy and this is specifically around college access.  The bill that Martha mentioned that's moving through Congress has the President's proposal for our College Access and Completion Fund which would include activities around financial literacy with respect to college access.  We have a very small program related to K-12 in terms of teaching economic literacy at the K-12 level.  We are definitely interested in this -- the Secretary ran a school before he was the superintendent of schools in Chicago that was focused on financial literacy initiatives.  So it is something we are looking for ways to promote. 

There are folks here at the Department who have been talking to folks at Treasury and HUD about ways that we could link up together to expand access to financial literacy programs.  So I think it is something that we are looking for ways to promote in addition to the existing programs.