CEFE Mission, Vision and Goals

Mission

To promote and assist public and private K-12 educators to meet a growing need among students for greater economic, financial and entrepreneurship education, and to assist them to become resourceful teachers in these areas, so that our students can be better informed citizens, consumers, employees, entrepreneurs, savers, investors and other roles they will assume over their lifetime.

Vision

To offer various members of our service region state-of-the-art, topical professional-development workshops, programs, resources and special events to meet the challenge of teaching economics to students so they may be successful participants as responsible citizens, consumers, workers and entrepreneurs in a global economy.

Goals

The Center assists and encourages teachers to be knowledgeable in economics so that their students can become better informed citizens, consumers, employees and entrepreneurs. We work directly with students but also focus on developing and training by providing:

• Topical workshops for teachers introducing new material for the K-12 classroom.
• The tools needed to meet the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for teachers who have little or no background in teaching economics and personal finance.
• A repository of economic education material, curriculum guides and classroom lessons on how to introduce key concepts to their students.
• Assistance to schools or school districts to create new course offerings in economics and personal finance or revise standards or benchmarks in these areas.
• Assistance to schools or school districts to plan activities and workshops to strengthen teachers’ knowledge and classroom strategies in economics, K-12.
• Partnership development with community organizations, businesses, foundations and others.

Recent State budget cuts to education have severely impacted the budgets of these districts and have hampered their ability to offer professional development opportunities to teachers. In several counties, teacher training budgets have been cut by 50 percent, others have been completely eliminated. The CEFE bridges the gap by providing workshops to teachers at no cost to them, or their respective school districts.