Further In US schools, financial education is taught in high school.
A growing number of states in the United States are making it mandatory for kids to graduate high school with a personal finance education. States want to raise maths proficiency among American pupils at the same time.
Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications is a subject offered by Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. The maths course has been given by the institution for over a decade. Students improve their maths abilities and get a foundational understanding of money management from this course. For example, classes cover credit, investments, and loans and relate these concepts to mathematical techniques for interest calculation, budgeting, and other applications.
Although the high school is at the forefront of financial education, several other institutions have recently started to offer comparable programmes.
Nine states in the United States have enacted laws or regulations mandating that personal finance education be taught in schools prior to high school graduation as of 2020. According to the non-profit Council for Economic Education in the United States, such regulations are currently in existence in 30 states.
The rise coincides with efforts by educators to raise pupils’ arithmetic proficiency, which fell during the epidemic and hasn’t quite recovered. However, young people’s overall distaste or lack of interest in maths continues to be a hurdle.
At the Washington school, the course is taught by Tonica Tatum-Gormes. According to her, when kids realise the connection between maths and their future financial security, their interest in the subject increases.
As a result of having to manage their finances and take out loans, students start to realise that “yes, I need to learn decimals, and I need to learn fractions, and I need to learn percentages,” according to Tatum-Gormes.
Proponents claim that by teaching students how to make wise financial decisions, personal finance courses inspire an interest in maths in the process.
Financial education, according to the Council for Economic Education, should cover topics including earning, budgeting, investing, saving, and handling credit and financial risk. It’s not necessary for a regular math teacher to teach the lesson, according to experts.
Students will be able to use knowledge from their economics, calculus, and algebra lectures in real-world scenarios thanks to the new programme. They will compute their future rent obligations, student loan obligations, and income needs in class.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008, economic uncertainty brought on by the pandemic, and the present high rate of inflation, according to experts, may have made Americans want to know more about finance. It has been reported by the Council for Economic Education that less than 25% of millennials possess basic financial literacy.
The American civil rights organisation NAACP published a resolution in 2020 advocating for more financial literacy initiatives in K–12 classrooms.
States lacking financial literacy requirements for high school students were examined in a research conducted by the nonprofit Next Gen Personal Finance Schools. It was shown that just 7% of pupils at schools with predominately Black and Hispanic student bodies have access to a half-year course on personal finance. For schools with fewer than 25% of pupils identifying as Black or Hispanic, that percentage jumps to 14.2 percent.
The Capital City Public Charter School’s financial literacy programme is motivated by this injustice. It provides services to a student body that is 25% Black and 64% Latino.
According to the school’s head, Laina Cox, “it’s an empowering course.”