Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
FTE at 50: Ted Tucker and Lisa Chang on Building Economic Literacy
Roger welcomes Ted Tucker, executive director of the Foundation for Teaching Economics (FTE) and Lisa Chang, director of operations and teacher programs at FTE, to discuss the organization’s 50-year legacy of teaching the economic way of thinking to high school students and teachers. They share the fascinating history of FTE’s founding in the 1970s, the pivotal role of leaders like Milton and Rose Friedman and Gary Walton, and how FTE has evolved to meet the needs of a changing world.
They explore why economic literacy is so critical, yet often neglected today, how FTE’s experiential and activity-based learning approach makes economics accessible, and why an engaging introductory economics course can be life-changing for students. Plus, insights on the difference between economic literacy and financial literacy and the unique power of understanding opportunity costs and trade-offs.
Ted and Lisa reflect on the personal growth they see in students and teachers who attend FTE programs, share stories of alumni success and outline their vision for the next 50 years of economic education.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today, I'm your host, Roger Ream. In 2013, the Fund for American Studies brought into its orbit the Foundation for Teaching Economics, known as FTE. Fte was founded 50 years ago this year and is the gold standard in teaching economics at the high school level. Today, on the Liberty and Leadership podcast, I have two excellent guests, both of whom oversee the programs of FTE. First, I'm joined by Ted Tucker, Executive Director for FTE. Ted brings nearly three decades of management and marketing experience to this role. I'm also joined by Lisa Chang, Director of Operations and Teacher Programs at FTE. Lisa manages programs for teachers and students, including the Economic Forces and American History Program, Economics for Leaders and a variety of online programs. Ted and Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Happy to be here. Our pleasure Roger.
Speaker 1:Well, happy anniversary. Fte, the Foundation for Teaching Economics, is celebrating its 50th anniversary 50 years of running superb programs around the world. Ted, could you give me a brief history of FTE and tell me a little bit about its founding?
Speaker 3:So the FTE originally was founded in 1975. That's sort of when the official documents were signed creating the foundation. But it really started a couple of years earlier when the original founder, a gentleman named Jack Hume, who was an industrialist out of San Francisco, was on vacation in Hawaii. While he was out there hanging out at the beach, he ran across remember this is early 1970s, kind of the height of the hippie counterculture period and ran across some young college students started chatting with them.
Speaker 3:You know Jack was always a curious guy and friendly and he had a short conversation with them and he walked away really kind of shocked on their lack of understanding of economics, really understanding kind of where the sort of material wealth that had helped create such great prosperity in the United States in the Western world had come from. They were very much talking about, you know, the importance of sharing and you know industrialists were bad and capitalism was bad, and so I think Jack was just really really shocked and kind of really upset about the education system in the United States and that's really started getting him thinking about how can I correct that, how can I come up with a way to supplement or help better educate young people? So he really started the foundation in 1975. And really the focus at the time of FTE was he thought that middle school was the place to go, so they started creating textbooks and film strips, which were these I remember those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember those film strips, yeah.
Speaker 3:For middle schools and trying to get this material adopted into middle schools across the country.
Speaker 1:I know there was a shift at some point away from middle schools and that you had some prominent people playing a role in the organization, like Rose and Milton Friedman, John Taylor from Stanford and the Hoover Institution, even the current Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright and we can get to that later perhaps but what was that shift that took place in FTE away from middle schools?
Speaker 3:From about 1975 right until around the late 80s, they were really still trying to push this middle school strategy. And when Jack Hume passed away in I think it was 1987, his two sons, george and Jerry Hume, took over the foundation in terms of running the foundation and one of the things they started to do was just sort of look at the idea of are we effective? Is what we're doing really reaching people? And after doing a fair amount of research and looking at metrics, they really realized that they weren't having an impact at all. Materials weren't being adopted in schools. They started casting around back with their board members to try to figure out how can we sort of do things differently, how do we reinvent the FTE to make it more effective?
Speaker 3:And I think the impetus to a reinvention started when talking with Milton and Rose Friedman, who were on the board really throughout, the idea that you really have to identify future leaders and teach them economics. And that really started the impetus of starting to look at maybe we need to be reaching high school. High school students, you know, really identify them early, start teaching them economics, the importance of economic freedom when they're young, before they get to, say, college, and maybe you know the feeling they might be brainwashed or their mindset changed, say college, and maybe the feeling they might be brainwashed or their mindset changed.
Speaker 1:You know, obviously there's a lot of very poor economic literacy at the highest levels of American society, whether it's in the media. You see it in government and many other areas, even in Hollywood and in movies and literature. But, Lisa, how does FT go about taking these complex economic concepts, or at least concepts that some people view as very complex, and then being able to make them accessible to high school students and engaging them in learning at FT programs?
Speaker 2:So, as you know, we do student programs but we also do teacher programs, so we're sort of trying to hit both ends there and reach the students really to communicate these concepts. But one of the best ways that we found to introduce these complex concepts is through experiential learning or hands-on active learning. That essentially means incorporating fun activities for the students that get them out of their seats and demonstrate the actual concepts of what they're getting from regular lectures. As an example, we've got a great activity called the Magic Markets, which I think you both are familiar with, obviously. That just teaches students that trade is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. There's an element of fun and surprise for the kids and it teaches them that trade can only happen when trading partners expect to gain from the exchange. So they're put into a trading simulation that's designed to illustrate a complex marketplace with the conditions that encourage or discourage trade among individuals, and it's a lot of fun to see.
Speaker 1:I know the organization's developed dozens and dozens of those types of activities-based ways of teaching important economic concepts, and that's great. I know that. One thing I guess that perhaps it was Milton Friedman suggested is that you adopt the Paul Hain approach to the economic way of thinking, ted. How do you incorporate that into the FTE programs beside? You know the activities that Lisa's talking about.
Speaker 3:The economic way of thinking. You know what Paul Hain was doing. He was an economist slash philosopher and he really wanted to understand human behavior and he ultimately distilled his idea, the economic way of thinking, down to just the idea that all social phenomena emerges from the choices of individuals in response to expected benefits and costs to themselves. What we've done is we've taken that theme that Paul created and really came up with these economic reasoning propositions which we think really encapsulate the economic way of thinking. These are people choose and the individual choices are the sources of social outcomes. Choices impose costs. People receive benefits and incur costs when they make decisions.
Speaker 3:People respond to incentives in predictable ways and then finally, of course, institutions are the rules of the game that influence choices. You know, laws, customs, moral principles, superstitions, cultural values all influence people's choices. We take that and we quit those propositions and make them sort of a theme throughout all of our programming, because we really want students and teachers, when they leave the programs, to be using this kind of economic way of thinking and any sort of decision-making that they need to make, whether a high school student has to decide do I go to college or do I get a job right out of high school, when you're in a voting booth and you have to make a decision about who to vote for. We just want to make sure that students and people have that kind of thinking when making those important choices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I suppose the students all incur opportunity costs when they decide to attend a Economics for Leaders program in the summer. Lisa, you know, I know FTE has changed over the years Ted talked about the shift from middle school to high school, but you know to keep up with current economic trends and student interests. What are some of the new programs that you've developed at FTE in the past decade or so to respond to other topics and other aspects of economics?
Speaker 2:So the curriculum has definitely evolved, both in content and delivery. As you know, we have a ton of talented economics educators who are always ready to incorporate new topics into our offerings for both students and teachers. But I would say that technology has also had a very big impact on how we provide and share information. For example, right after COVID hit, we had to pivot and decided to offer all our programs in a virtual format, so now we regularly use Zoom, google Docs apps that help us to present and share more interactive content during the programs. As a side note, when I started at FTE back in 2007, we were still using paper applications and I was assembling individual binders for the teachers. For every program, for each teacher, we had a very rudimentary website. As I recall Ted can correct me on that we may not have even had a website, so we've had some huge improvements since then. As far as your question about the new programs, we've offered a socialism myths and realities program for teachers, as well as an entrepreneurship program, and there's an entrepreneurship program for students as well.
Speaker 1:Ted, maybe you want to speak to the role of longtime president Gary Walton, who I know was someone you've been close to and he played a pivotal role in the organization and still a supporter of what we do.
Speaker 3:Gary was really to me an entrepreneur and a visionary. Gary was really to me an entrepreneur and a visionary when he was asked to become the president in 1990 of FTE. He also had great connections. You know he was connected with Milton Friedman and was able to really think through when Milton talked about. You know you need to teach future leaders economics.
Speaker 3:Gary was the one that really put in place the FTE flagship economics for leaders, which was really a kind of a combination of identifying future leaders, bringing them to a one-week program and then introducing them to the economic way of thinking. The other real strength that Gary had was an incredible network and an ability to identify talent. I mean he went out and was able to hire, I think, some of the best curriculum creators in the country to work for FTE. And then, finally, he also was instrumental in bringing two other Nobel laureates on the board of FTE. Doug understand why some nations are wealthy and some nations aren't. Doug's work really looked at the role of institutions, and so we at FTE have really incorporated that in a lot of our materials. And then, of course, vernon Smith in experimental economics. You know we started using some of his material on, you know, game theory as well.
Speaker 1:As a matter of fact, Ted, I have to mention I saw Vernon Smith last week at a dinner here in Washington DC, so he is going strong at, I think, what age 98? Yeah, and I know you sent me a photo of him at one of our teacher programs in Colorado earlier this year, I guess it was, or late last year, which is remarkable. He's still very productive and you shared with me kind of the distinction between trying to improve economic literacy, teaching the economic way of thinking, and the emphasis put on in some schools on financial literacy and the distinction between the two and the importance of not neglecting economic literacy at the expense of, you know, doing the financial literacy. Give me some of your thoughts on that, because I think you made some excellent points in that, as we just came off of April being financial literacy month.
Speaker 3:When you think about it all, schools have scarcity of time in terms of the number of periods. Opportunity costs right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3:I think there's only 26 states across the nation that require economics for graduation, while there's over 36 or 37 states now that require financial literacy for graduation.
Speaker 3:That's a number that's like tripled in the last 15 years, and I think that push towards financial literacy is really driven by the Frank Dodd Act that had been passed post the 2008 recession.
Speaker 3:That act requires banks to promote financial literacy. The issue or the problem really is that financial literacy is about investing, saving, budgeting, but it's not really about the decision-making that comes with. When you think about investing or budgeting, you really need to use economics and the economic way of thinking on marginal costs, marginal benefit, opportunity costs when you're making decisions of what to do with your money. When I look at the current administration's policy on tariffs and you start hearing from people who are saying, oh well, foreign countries or foreign governments are going to pay for the tariffs that the current administration wants to put into place, it really shows you just how economically illiterate many Americans are. They don't understand that a tariff is a tax and it's a tax on imports, which you know Americans are going to pay, and so I think that's where you really start seeing the issue that we need more economic literacy and less financial literacy.
Speaker 1:Now, lisa, you know FTE kind of divides its student programming through the economics for leaders programs and a whole range of teacher programs. You touched on the fact that they're both virtual in-person. I know the in-person can be a short program, a day-long or three-day-long or even a week-long. What are some of the offerings, and are teachers really looking to FTE for help?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely they need support resources. I've always felt that teachers really need what we can provide. As far as economic teaching, it's time, it's curriculum, it's planning, it's money to plan out a semester's worth of courses because there are certain topics you want to address in a certain order, so it makes more sense to the students. We have a lot of teachers who are relatively new to teaching economics, so those are definitely our adult learners. But we also have teachers who are experts at economics and they live and breathe it. So we have a full gamut of expertise in our programs.
Speaker 2:But that makes the residential programs a huge hit in particular. But the virtual programs offer a lot of flexibility for teachers who don't have the time or resources to travel and there's an incredible amount of collaboration and support and mentoring going on for all the teachers at the programs. Another example in our Economics for Teachers programs, where the students and teachers are together, we have our staff mentor teachers run activities with the entire group. The teacher attendees are watching so they can see sort of how exactly it's run in a real-life setting, see the challenges that might arise, see the questions that the students come up with, and that gives them a lot more confidence to take that activity back to their own classrooms and run it. So we have a lot of teacher support in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1:Ted Lisa mentioned the Socialism Myths and Realities program that FTE undertook the past year and a half a partnership with the Fraser Institute. Talk a little more about what that was all about and what the outcomes were for that program.
Speaker 3:The Fraser Institute received a grant to really examine the realities of socialism. I think ultimately was to just show that even though there's a large number of young people who support socialism, young people really don't know what that means. So part of the grant was to really help define what does socialism mean to people today? And then, of course, the other part really ultimately was to show that socialism just doesn't work. It's been tried over and over again and yet the same issues or themes that cause it to fail just show up everywhere or show up all the time.
Speaker 3:So Frazier put together a series of research, of books. They did some great material that can be used in the classroom. But they came to FTE because of our expertise in actually creating lesson plans and delivering lessons. Our part in the grant process really was to create educational programming using Frazier's research and all the supplemental materials. It was really, I think, a very successful partnership for both organizations. It allowed us to really create some brand new programming. You know, at least from the evaluations from teachers, it's clearly it's very effective. Frazier obviously has great resources that are available to anybody.
Speaker 1:Now Last few years at least. I know you've both been working so hard with your team there to hit record numbers of students. You told me the other day you're fully enrolled this year in teacher programs. It shows, I think, the importance of the mission that we're undertaking together that there's such a demand among students and teachers for the programming. How's that like Lisa managing all that process and having Ted standing behind you there pushing for more students and more teachers all the time?
Speaker 2:We have an incredible team here, no complaints.
Speaker 2:It's exciting, honestly, to be able to sort of hear from the teachers at how valuable our programs are and our resources are. You know the interaction that I do have with students. I work a lot with our scholarship students and that's also amazing because they get so much out of our programs, not just the economics content but the leadership and the lessons they take home about themselves. There's a lot of personal growth that goes on during the student programs and that's pretty invaluable. The parents also. I hear from parents as well and Ted can attest to this too who just say that their kids are almost different individuals for the better after they go to an EFL program or one of our other student programs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Roger, and when we were thinking about, obviously, this podcast, one of the things that I remembered was I think it was your college roommate who had sent his daughter you'd shared a note that he had sent to you, which was something along the lines of he got an email midway through the program from his daughter saying you know, this is the best experience I've had in my life. Thank you, dad. And I just thought, wow, that's just a lot of power that we're able to have, or influence we're able to have in a positive way on young people. And, as Lisa said, we see that all the time and I think that's you know, when you're getting feedback like that from parents, you know we're doing something right.
Speaker 1:You know he also sent one of his sons at least one of his sons I know who turned his FTE experience into his college essay when he applied to college. So that kind of impact is very rewarding to hear that and I know you get a lot of that feedback. Sometimes hard to translate all that in a way that we communicate that to our supporters, but it's definitely impactful programs and you hear that from teachers and students and parents. Are there any particular success stories that you can call to mind just on the spot here? You know I've heard from people later in life who I've stumbled upon and mentioned the Foundation for Teaching Economics is now part of the Fund for American Studies. We have the strategic partnership together and they say, oh, I did an FTE program and we have students coming to our summer programs who've done FTE programs when they're in high school. Fte certainly has a lot of alumni out there.
Speaker 3:There's a very early alum who did our programs in the early, I would say, mid-90s. Now you know she's Vanessa Countryman. She's now SEC secretary. She got a law degree from University of Chicago, a master's in philosophy from Oxford, and actually worked for us as a camp counselor for several years before kind of moving on. And so you know, I think of someone like that and there's more people like her that are out there. I know you know a great colleague. Her name is Maddie Overturf. She is now a news anchor in Delaware. I mean it kind of shows you the breadth of where students go, the skills that we offer, the economic way of thinking these students are able to take into whatever field they want to go to.
Speaker 1:Someone who did our teacher program I know, who was elected to the state senate in Illinois and he has come back as a teacher at FTE and now teaching other teachers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Tom Rooney, he did FTE programming, like you said. Yeah, became a state assemblyman in the state of Illinois and he's one of our highly skilled mentor teachers.
Speaker 2:And Tom will be at one of our summer programs.
Speaker 1:Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, you do assemble a great team of people, is it 28 high school student programs this summer, ted.
Speaker 3:For this summer it will be 30. We'll be running 30 programs, so 25 of them will be in person and then five of them are virtual.
Speaker 1:And that's a lot of staffing you have to pull together for all that, including not just instructors but those counselors, as you say, that stay in the dorms and chaperone, and these are all held on college campuses. That's been the approach FT's taken is to look for college campuses.
Speaker 3:We've done the programming in the summer, obviously because that's when students are free and it's also when universities typically will have space available to lease. We go to different campuses around the United States and you know, lease meeting space, lease dorm space, and we always try to look at universities that are easy for students to get to, universities that might be popular with the students and families and, obviously, universities that are easy to work with for our type of programming.
Speaker 1:If there were kind of one lesson in economics you think every student should leave the program with, or perhaps every American should have, you know, what would that be?
Speaker 3:My feeling always is that voluntary trade creates wealth. People should have the choice to trade with whoever they would like to trade with. And when I talk about trade, of course, in our society now we would be trading money for an item that they would like, or a product or a service that you start having barriers put in place to that ability. It affects people's standard of living, whether that barrier is by governments, through tariffs, or companies and monopolistic behavior.
Speaker 2:I would say, Roger, I think just gaining a better understanding of basic economics is just critical across the board because it affects so many real-life, real-world decisions for people. But if you wanted me to narrow it down a bit, I don't know, there's something about the idea of opportunity cost or cost-benefit analysis that I think is an important concept for people to understand.
Speaker 1:I was just thinking about what I would say, and it's related to what you said, Lisa. I like TEDs a lot, but Milton Friedman said there's no such thing as a free lunch and that's, I think, a way of saying opportunity costs. But you know, whatever government does, in particular a person does, you know there's a cost attached to it of something foregone. And I think Thomas Sowell said is there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs, because you're foregoing something if you decide to do something. So if people would incorporate these lessons into their heads, like we do with the students coming to our programs, I think we'd have a lot sounder public policy and economic policy.
Speaker 1:I had Bob Lawson on the podcast recently. Ted, you presented our Gary Walton Prize for Excellence in Economic Education to Bob at our conference in Naples, Florida, in March. He's doing great work at SMU, but something else he does with the Fraser Institute is the Index of Economic Freedom, which shows the freest countries in the world. It ranks them, of course, from one to North Korea. I think it's a great teaching tool. Is that something you use in the FTE programs?
Speaker 3:We do. We really value that index. We use it in our student programs, our economics for leaders programs. We use it also in many of our different teacher programs as well, because it does such a wonderful job illustrating the relationship between economic freedom and human prosperity. And it's very easy to see that nations that are economically free are also the nations that have the most wealth. Their societies prosper more. They have the most wealth. Their societies prosper more. They have lower infant mortality, they have longer lifespans, basically higher standards of living, and it's very powerful in demonstrating that Countries that are not economically free North Korea is one you mentioned, Venezuela, Cuba their standards of living are so much lower.
Speaker 1:Their life expectancies, infant mortality, are just not as good as countries that embrace economic freedom, students, tfas having programs for college students and young professionals, both putting a strong emphasis on the importance of learning about the economic way of thinking. I think we're filling a void that would just be so large if it weren't for our programming that we're doing in this space. So I don't want to keep you on this podcast too long, because I know you're still busy recruiting students for the summer and lining up all the details. I know you'll be around the country, from Yale to Berkeley, from Rice to Ohio State. Just a couple of things before we go. What about the international dimension? Will you have many international students participating, either in person, because they're over here on exchange programs, or through the virtual programs? Is there an interest among international students in FTE programs?
Speaker 3:That's a great question, roger, and I know Lisa can jump in as well. But yes, we do see virtual programs. We see probably a good 10 to 15 percent of the participants are students in India, japan, europe, south America who are participating in the program and we're always fascinated because our virtual programs are synchronous programs, so they start at 8 am Eastern time and run to about 3 pm Eastern time. So some of these students in, say, south Korea, are getting up at the middle of the night and sitting through five hours of class because they really value it and for our in-person programming I think the numbers are as great. But yes, we're seeing international students flying in, whether from India or China or Europe, to spend a week on these college campuses.
Speaker 1:Last, thing is, if I were someone coming to you today to say I've got a million dollars I want to invest in economic education, could you use it? Are there things that are on your wish list you'd like to be doing, that you're unable to do I?
Speaker 3:would love to expand our student programming. My dream would be able to do our economics for leaders in every state of the union and recruit the top students from each state to sit through our program. That way, when they go out and they do become future leaders within their own states or move into government or business, we would have leaders in every state that understand economics, understand the economic thinking, and we just would get better decisions, yeah, and I guess you're in close to half now, so a ways to go, but it's a doable goal Anything you can add to that, lisa.
Speaker 2:That would be amazing. You know I would agree with Ted. But you know, increasing the reach of our teacher programs, obviously for me, you know whether it's just increasing the number. New curriculum, there's so many places where that would be so valuable and in terms of thinking about students, there's just a lot of students that we aren't reaching as much. You know, it'd be great to do outreach, to get in-person sort of visits, so to speak, to recruit students from around the country. We're just limited right now with what we can do to recruit, but we're doing a great job.
Speaker 1:I'd like to test the Economics for Leaders program on adult audience as well. You know where you could get 30 journalists in a room and do a day or two of the kinds of activities-based learning and teaching of economic concepts with some of our top faculty or, obviously, politicians or young political leaders or people in think tanks. I notice economic literacy is a problem in think tanks too. Even some of the traditional, more market-oriented think tanks have students now who come to work there who haven't really had any economics, and so there's a big need to do more. But thank you both, ted and Lisa, for all you're doing now and your team at FTE, your offices in Davis, california. I look forward to seeing some of the programs this summer around the country and continue to work with you to accomplish our mission. Ted, lisa, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us, Roger. It is a wonderful opportunity to be here and talk to you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, roger, for hosting, we really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
