Last week, I attended the Second Annual Financial Literacy Leadership Conference (sponsored by the Society for Financial Education & Professional Development) Presenters and attendees were the Who's Who in Financial Literacy, forward-thinking change agents from Government, Non-Profits, and For-Profits.  An over-arching theme across all the sessions was Efficacy: What works, How to measure it, How to drive it.
 
This is timely, given the Federal Government is mobilizing missions and millions for financial literacy programs provided or overseen by Departments of Treasury, Education, Commerce, and the new Consumer Finance Protection Agency, among others.  
Ironically, one of the problems slowing our progress in Financial Literacy is that there are so many financial literacy "programs" out there that are marginally effective or worse.  Appallingly, many simply have no effectiveness measures at all.  "Website hits" and "number of clients served" have little merit of efficacy, and no merit whatsoever if their offerors are actually steering visitors to financial institutions that intend to sell them a credit card, a reverse-mortgage, or debt management services.
 
Quite frankly, considering the glut of financial literacy programs, those that don't measure the learning they deliver are just clutter in the way of real progress.