April is Financial Literacy Month, which is supposed to be a time when we marvel at the progress we’ve made in making the public smarter about finance.

Yet after nearly two decades of effort, the studies not only show little progress, but actual backsliding in the public’s financially savvy.

The problem has much to do with who’s in back of most literacy efforts: business. A credit card company isn’t going to warn you not to spend more than you can pay off in a given month, and a brokerage firm isn’t going to send you to Finra’s BrokerCheck to be sure you’re broker isn’t a sleazeball.

I wrote about the problems with literacy efforts in my column for TheStreet. You can read it here.