When Stamford High School students arrive at their personal finance class, they’re greeted by a stock ticker and a TV monitor showing the day’s business and financial news.

Printed below, on the yellow wall, is a collage of words like “independence,” “generational wealth” and “dream big.” “Your journey to financial freedom starts here,” another wall reads.

This is the school’s recently renovated financial literacy lab. As schools across Connecticut work to meet a new graduation requirement, Stamford — with help from the city’s well-established finance sector — is staying a few steps ahead.

The district already offered personal finance as an elective before the statewide requirement went into effect. Now, it’s upping its game, in part with the help of a $150,000 grant from Stamford-based financial services company Synchrony.

It’s part of $3 million in grants Synchrony has rolled out nationwide under its “Empowering Financial Futures” initiative over the last two years. And it comes as interest in K-12 financial literacy grows around the U.S. 

“Kids need to start to get focused on this, and they need to understand what true financial literacy is,” Sue Bishop, Synchrony’s chief corporate affairs officer, said at the lab’s grand opening last month. 

The company’s grant to Stamford’s public schools went toward purchasing a live stock ticker and two TV monitors, along with dozens of finance-related games, books and activities. The materials will support a now-mandatory personal finance class, which includes topics ranging from household budgeting to investment and loan planning. 

Connecticut Financial Scholars, part of a national organization seeking to bring financial literacy into K-12 education, helped Stamford design the course. Director of Program Support Elisa Oliver said it’s exciting to witness students picking up new skills.

“Seeing kids actually break down a loan amortization calculator,” Oliver marveled. “We’re seeing students having these conversations when they’re 15, 16 years old, which is awesome.”

Toward increasing economic mobility

Connecticut’s financial literacy requirement , with the state legislature voting overwhelmingly in favor. The mandate also received support from Gov. Ned Lamont and state Treasurer Erick Russell. 

“Personal financial management is one of the most important instructional tools that we can give young people to achieve economic independence and stability throughout their lives,” Lamont when the bill was signed into law. “Requiring it to graduate from high school is simply common sense.”

Under the requirement, starting in the fall of 2023, public high school students in the state had to take a half-credit personal finance course to graduate, starting with the class of 2027. The state is using curriculum developed by , a national organization that has developed the most-used personal finance curriculum in the country. 

In an interview with the Connecticut Mirror, Russell said the financial literacy requirement fits into broader wealth-building and financial security efforts supported by the state. He pointed to programs like , and the — the state’s 529 college savings program — as additional examples.

“Having that strong educational foundation and understanding of finances is also key,  so that people can take advantage of some of those opportunities,” he said. “We want to make sure, as we look at this investment from Synchrony and others like it, as we look at the financial education course requirement, that we’re setting people up for long term success in our state.”

In requiring personal finance coursework, Connecticut joined a growing national trend. According to , 39 states currently require students to take a personal finance course before high school graduation.

“As more states adopt these requirements, ensuring educators have the training, tools, and ongoing support to teach personal finance effectively is becoming increasingly important,” Steve Bumbaugh, the council’s CEO, said in a on Monday.

That sentiment is echoed by Connecticut Financial Scholars. In the years since the organization set up shop in the state, it has worked to promote financial literacy education, with a focus on Connecticut’s large cities and higher-need school districts.

The goal is to promote equity in access to financial knowledge in the state, said organization executive director Betsy McNeil.

“Without adequate financial education, students are more likely to struggle with debt or financial stress that really can impact them on a daily basis and can limit their economic mobility,” she said. “We’re looking to equip the students with the really essential financial skills, knowledge, awareness and confidence.”

Bishop, of Synchrony, said the need to teach financial literacy has grown as more and more young people, especially college students, get wrapped up in the world of sports gambling and prediction markets.

“You can get that same high by investing in the stock market or saving in a mutual fund — in a much safer and much more beneficial way,” Bishop said.

Connecticut Financial Scholars is active in a number of schools, using a four-part strategy of curriculum, teacher support, parent engagement and community involvement to further spread its message. 

After the Connecticut personal finance requirement was established, the organization on how to implement financial education curricula in their classrooms.

Efforts like the Stamford High School lab also help, McNeil said, by providing ways for community members and local institutions to support student learning. In the coming months she said she hopes more communities will benefit from this kind of investment.

“We continue to explore and listen for those opportunities in the other communities that we’re in as well,” she said, noting that Stamford is one of the state’s “alliance districts,” a group of under-resourced school districts in Connecticut. 

“This is needed in Stamford, and we recognize and understand it is needed in other communities across the state as well,” McNeil added.

Stamford ahead of the curve

Synchrony’s Bishop said she’s glad the personal finance course also devotes time to more mundane topics, such as building a good credit score. “You honestly cannot live in this country without credit,” she said.

When she graduated high school, Bishop said the extent of her financial literacy was knowing how to balance a checkbook. That didn’t change until her first job, which happened to be at a mutual fund company.

“I was like, ‘I’m not good at math. I’m a communications person. What am I doing?’” Bishop said. “I still say it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I learned about investing.”

Courses like Stamford’s aim to put that kind of knowledge in the classroom where, in theory, every student will be exposed to it. Bishop said that also has an upside for banks themselves.

“We never want to loan money to someone who can’t pay us back,” she said. “We have a vested interest in developing young people to be responsible adults.”

Stamford High School personal finance teacher Doug Taylor said for the final assessment of the class, students face a “life scenario” in which they manage a household budget while handling unexpected problems like a car breaking down.

“In the end of that cycle, they must have had the budget balanced,” Taylor said.

Stamford senior Nick Sutin said he’s landed a job with a nearby finance company, and he said he gives some credit to the finance classes he’s taken. He said that expertise helped him make a strong impression.

“You already have the background to answer all these types of questions,” Sutin said.

Stamford students who want to study finance topics beyond the state requirement have plenty of opportunities. The high school boasts 12 business teachers, most of whom have business or financial work experience. Their classes include entrepreneurship, business communications and investing. Some students even build stock portfolios and take part in competitions with other high schools.

“This is not vocational. This is finance. This is investments. This is starting a business,” said Dorothea Mackey, the head of Stamford High School’s Career and Technical Education department.

Mackey, who previously worked as an analyst at Chrysler Capital, played a leading role in securing Synchrony’s support for the new financial literacy lab.

“This is just pushing this envelope a little bit forward to make sure that the business education is solidified,” she said.

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School curriculum is usually the purview of education experts, but this fall it could be decided by California voters, who will vote on adding a new requirement for high school students: a one-semester class in managing personal finances.

California’s Secretary of State is poised to certify that the  is eligible for the November ballot, which would add financial literacy to the list of high school graduation requirements beginning with the class of 2030.

Students would learn about paying for college, online banking, taxes, budgeting, credit, retirement accounts, loans, how the stock market works and other topics. The issue is critical, organizers said, as students face a shifting economy and difficult decisions about college, careers and their futures.

“No one comes out of the womb knowing how to manage their credit score. It has to be taught,” said Tim Ranzetta, co-founder of a  and a chief backer of the initiative. “And right now there’s a dramatic gap between what students know and what they need to know. We have to change that.”

Voters seem to agree with him. A 2022  of adults nationwide showed that nearly 90% support a financial literacy requirement in high school, and nearly as many wished they had taken such a course when they were students. 

That’s not surprising, considering the financial woes many people incur. The average  is $8,366, the sixth-highest rate in the country, and 1 in 6 borrowers nationwide are in default on their student loans. 

Financial literacy already in classrooms

But some education experts have pushed back, not because they’re opposed to financial literacy for students but because they question whether voters are best equipped to dictate what’s taught in classrooms.

Currently, the state’s History-Social Studies framework includes a , required for graduation, that covers much of the same material proposed by the financial literacy ballot initiative proponents. Financial literacy is also included in first, second and ninth grade curriculum. First graders, for example, learn that money can be exchanged for goods and services, and people make decisions about how to spend their money.

But Ranzetta said the curriculum, which was last updated in 2017, doesn’t focus enough on financial literacy. Personal finance is covered for only a few weeks in the economics course; the rest covers more abstract economic concepts like international trade, resource allocation and the benefits and drawbacks of capitalism. Individual teachers can choose how much they want to focus on certain topics.

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond wouldn’t answer questions about the ballot initiative, although he endorsed it. Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education, also wouldn’t answer questions. 

Leaving curriculum decisions to voters is ‘a bad idea’

The proposed ballot initiative so far has almost zero opposition, but some are questioning the idea of letting voters — and not education experts — decide what students learn in the classroom. Ordinarily, curriculum in California is developed by a group of teachers and subject-matter professionals who serve on the , which meets publicly six times a year. New curriculum is subject to multiple reviews, edits and public vetting, ultimately going before the  for adoption. Local school boards can adjust curriculum according to the needs of their students.

Polikoff worries that adopting curriculum through ballot initiatives could set a dangerous precedent. Religious or anti-LGBTQ curriculum, for example, could be approved by voters, setting up costly and lengthy legal showdowns with the state Department of Education. 

Curriculum can be complicated, as well. When writing new curricula, the Instructional Quality Commission looks at the broader context, making sure students get new material every year that builds on what they learned previously, subjects don’t overlap and topics are flexible enough for teachers to adapt lessons to the individual needs of their students. Textbooks and tests are also taken into consideration. 

Legislature weighs in

Most curriculum updates and changes originate with the commission, but sometimes the Legislature weighs in. The state’s new  and  requirements, for example, stemmed from Assembly bills. Another bill, , would add computer science as a graduation requirement.

, a financial literacy bill proposed by Democrat  of Sacramento, would actually do almost the same thing as the ballot initiative. The bill would require financial literacy as a graduation requirement, although it would go into effect until 2031, a year later than the ballot measure.

Bruce Fuller, education professor at UC Berkeley, said he worries about the increasing politicization of curriculum — either from the Legislature or those pushing for ballot initiatives.

“We have these political interests unabashedly trying to control what’s taught in the classroom, instead of leaving it up to teachers and locally elected school boards,” Fuller said. “We should trust those folks to devise thoughtful curriculum that’s appropriate for their students.”

He also questioned the ever-growing list of graduation requirements. High schools only offer six or seven class periods a day, and with more required classes there’s less room for art and other electives. Some districts have started adding an extra period so students can fit in all the classes they need to take to graduate,  and qualify for California’s public universities. 

“I’m not sure how adding more required classes is going to motivate restless teenagers,” Fuller said. “With more requirements, we’re giving them almost no chance to study things they’re actually interested in.” 

McCarty’s bill  is not the Legislature’s first attempt to wade into financial literacy. A dozen bills requiring financial literacy have died or been vetoed in recent years, in most cases because financial literacy curriculum already exists and the state already has a system for adopting curriculum.

As Gov. Jerry Brown wrote in 2018 when he  that would have made financial literacy materials available to teachers: “This bill is unnecessary. The History-Social Science Framework already contains financial literacy content for pupils in kindergarten through grade 12, as well as a financial literacy elective.”

Ranzetta said the Legislature’s inability to pass a financial literacy curriculum is what spurred him to take the matter directly to voters.

“I recognize the value of the process, but it’s slow and so far it hasn’t worked in California,” he said. “The issue is too urgent and too popular to wait any longer.”     

Ranzetta grew up in New Jersey, where his father was a banker and his mother was a community volunteer who raised six children. He learned financial literacy from his parents, and assumed other young people did, too. It wasn’t until he started volunteering at an East Palo Alto high school that he realized many students are clueless about money, and that ignorance can hamper them throughout their lives. But they were eager to learn, he said, and share the information with their parents.

That experience inspired him to start NextGen Personal Finance, which offers free financial literacy curriculum and training for teachers. At least 7,000 teachers in California and more than 100,000 nationwide have participated, he said.

A class that demystifies money

At Berkeley High, Crystal Rigley Janis teaches two economics classes and three personal finance classes, covering topics she wishes she knew as a young person: how to negotiate a salary, not relying on gut instinct when investing, and avoiding individual stocks in favor of index funds.

“It took me 15 years to understand those things, and it probably cost me millions of dollars,” said Rigley, who worked for several years at a wealth management firm before going into teaching. “I don’t want other people to make the mistakes I did.”

Eliza Maier, a senior, was so inspired by Rigley’s class that she opened a Roth IRA when she turned 18 and transferred money from her low-interest savings account. The class, she said, helped demystify money and the role it can play in major life choices.

“We learned that money isn’t good or bad – it’s a tool,” Maier said. “It can help you realize your goals. It can help you be prepared for whatever happens in your life. I didn’t know anything about money when I started taking this class, but I think it’s so important, especially for high school students.”

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North Dakota has launched an online financial education website as part of a larger effort to make the state the most financially literate in the U.S. by 2027.

The effort is spearheaded by Superintendent of Public Instruction Kirsten Baesler, Treasurer Thomas Beadle, the Bank of North Dakota, Gov. Doug Burgum’s Office and a handful of other state agencies.

North Dakota residents can create a free account on to access education modules on budgeting, decreasing credit card debt and other topics, Kelvin Hullet, chief business development officer for the Bank of North Dakota, said at a Tuesday press conference announcing the website. The site also includes a research-based financial personality test to help residents reflect on how they use their money.

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“This is a unique website,” Hullet said. “It dives in deeper than maybe typically what you would see with other types of education or other websites.”

Those who complete assignments on the are eligible to win cash prizes.

“When residents are financially healthy, there are far-reaching positive impacts on their personal well-being and the state’s economy,” Burgum said in a Tuesday announcement. “Reducing financial stress improves mental health. Making good financial decisions decreases the number of people with excessive credit card debt. More people are able to purchase homes, start or expand a business, and have increased expendable income.”

A 2021 survey published by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority asked Americans across the country to answer a seven-question financial literacy quiz. In North Dakota, only 37% of respondents got more correct answers than the median. In Minnesota and South Dakota, those figures were 41% and 38%, respectively, according to the Tuesday announcement from the governor’s office.

The state’s goal is for about two-thirds of North Dakotans to beat the median score in 2027.

North Dakota’s other performance targets for the 2027 survey include:

For roughly two-thirds of surveyed residents to report having at least three months’ worth of emergency funds. In 2021, just 52% of North Dakota respondents met this standard.For only one-third of respondents to report experiencing financial anxiety. In 2021, this figure was 56%.For about two-thirds of surveyed residents to participate in employer-based retirement plans, compared to 57% in 2021.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. North Dakota Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Amy Dalrymple for questions: info@northdakotamonitor.com. Follow North Dakota Monitor on and .

One day, students at Hillside High School were greeted in Shianyisimi Ogede’s economics and personal finance class with the question: “What percentage of students get financial aid?” With this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) opening in , financing education after high school is one of the many topics she covers with her 10th and 12th grade students.

In early December, the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College in Vermont released a , grading each state on its delivery of personal finance education in high school. According to the report, these courses are increasingly being offered in schools across the country after the pandemic highlighted the extent of income inequality. More concern about students learning about loans for college and filling out the FAFSA has also been an influence.

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The report says that high school financial instruction improves credit scores, lowers loan delinquency rates, and reduces the use of risky services such as payday lending.

Seven states earned an “A” grade based on how well they guaranteed and executed access to a course focused on personal finance for students that graduated from high school in the spring of 2023. The center projects that in five years, 23 states will meet the same standard — with North Carolina being one of them. Now, along with 41% of other states, North Carolina sits at a “B.”

Preparation for these courses has been aided by the increase of free online curricular courses offered by state departments of education and other organizations. The report projects that there will be a need for 30,000 highly trained personal finance educators in the states that earned an A or B grade by 2028.

The North Carolina legislature in 2019 requiring financial literacy discussions in schools as a graduation requirement.

During summer 2020, the offered virtual professional development for the new course. This 40-hour professional development included presentations from NCCEE, , The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and . The five-day training consisted of a pretest, group activities, and a post test, as well as access to free resources to help them teach the course.

Sandy Wheat, executive director of the NCCEE, said that teachers gained more confidence about their own financial well-being after the training.

“We have teachers who report that they’re going to pay down unsecured debt because they didn’t really understand how the compound interest was working against them. And at the same time, they’re learning how compound interest works for them when they’re investing,” Wheat said.

The number of financial decisions that students have to make increases during and especially after high school. Meanwhile, the report found most parents do not feel financially savvy enough to discuss financial matters with their children at home, leaving schools to foot the education bill.

The report found large disparities in financial capability among different groups in the United States. According to the report, without state requirements for a standalone course, schools with higher fractions of students of color are less likely to have access to a required personal finance courses or content.

Along with covering student loans and financial aid, Ogede said her students learn the importance of investing and managing their credit. They complete an extra credit project with students from Duke University by way of the program, where they decide how to split $100 between stocks, bonds, and companies that they have a personal interest in. At the end of the course, they get the $100 transferred to their personal name.

“In America, wealth is connected with your credit score, because if they don’t have a good credit score, you’re going to get a higher interest rate,” Ogede said. “You’ll find that most of the time, there are parents that passed knowledge back to them, you know, there are grandparents who invested, and they and the parents invested, and they taught the children. Now, when you come to the Brown and Black population, it was not their history, because they didn’t grow up in that, it wasn’t passed down to them that way.”

Wheat said that the financial landscape has become more complex, causing more concerns for students.

“You know, it wasn’t too long ago that people would go to work for a company and work 25 or 30 years and retire with a pension and live happily ever after. With the reduction in corporate benefits, people are more and more responsible for their own financial futures,” Wheat said.

“People can’t do the right thing if they don’t know what the right thing is.”

Wheat said she believes that offering a personal finance course is another way for teachers to focus on what their communities need the most.

“I mean, think about if you’re navigating a ship with a compass, and you alter it by one degree, you’re going to wind up somewhere completely different than you intended to go or then you were bound for,” Wheat said. “So if you can take students that are thinking of dropping out of school, and you can convince them that their earning power is going to increase if they’ll just stay in school, then that’s a win. If you’ve gotten them to graduate, but then you have students who they’re going to graduate, but then what? This course gives them the opportunity to explore what’s next after school.”

Teachers who went through the training with NCCEE gave positive feedback. Wheat said students never ask teachers, “How will I use this in real life?”

To learn more about financial literacy requirements in the state of North Carolina, read the education standards

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Signed by Gov. Dan McKee on June 1, creates a Dec. 31 deadline to develop and approve state-specific consumer education and personal finance standards. By the start of the 2022-23 school year, all public high schools in Rhode Island must offer a standards-aligned course.

“It’s very aggressive to get these standards up and running in the time frame that we have set out, but we know that it’s really necessary,” state Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green said. On average, , at $36,193.

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Having met with students statewide who felt they weren’t prepared to go onto college, and given the pandemic’s impact on student engagement, the commissioner told �鶹��Ʒ this moment was the time to solidify what they had built momentum behind for years.

“[Students] felt like this was something that they were being shortchanged [on]. So we made it a point to push this agenda.”

Rhode Island approved the national Council on Economic Education standards in 2014. On average only about 5 percent of Rhode Island students receive financial literacy education, according to the state education department, given that schools could choose whether or not to adopt the curricula.

Last year, senior Saloni Jain took a personal finance course in a hybrid learning setup, with three days of learning online, at the suburban East Greenwich High School. She said course simulations, like completing mock returns on and creating a budgeting spreadsheet, kept her engaged during virtual learning.

“We were getting paychecks — how do we put that money towards a 401(k) and pay all our bills and pay down our credit card or student loan debt? That was really helpful to visualize, you know, how we might live in the future,” Jain said. “It was just a one-semester course, but it honestly changed the way I think a lot.”

Nationally, have some version of financial literacy standards, which may be incorporated into math or civics classrooms, though be completed before graduation. 

In 2021, strengthening personal finance education. Advocates contend that literacy is key to breaking cycles of poverty, particularly as the younger generation deals with economic fallout from the pandemic. When loans, budgeting and debt management are explicitly explored during the school day, young people are exposed to as they head into adulthood.

A showed that financial literacy graduation requirements result in lower credit card balances and high-interest student loan debt for lower -income students, and decreases in private loans for higher-income students. Working- and lower-class students who took financial literacy courses were also able to work less while enrolled in college, which could encourage college persistence and graduation. Expanding access to personal finance courses and support homeownership down the line.

Even within states considered to have the strongest standards and requirements, students seek more real-world connections to prepare them for the future. Whitman Ochiai, who recently graduated from high school in Alexandria, Virginia, described his mandatory course as “more broad than it was deep”.

Left wondering about retirement decisions, building a balanced budget and the intuition behind large purchases, he started the in 2019 to explore thosetopics. He said there’s been increased interest throughout the pandemic, likely with more students working and families facing economic uncertainty.

“A lot of times the only people who have access to this information are the people who would have had access to it anyway,” Ochiai said. “Especially for first-generation college- goers and students, and parents that may not be homeowners, this is a pathway for them to have a deeper understanding of finance.”

Some Rhode Island teachers created elective courses in their schools in recent years, heeding students’ desires and seeing how financial literacy may enable connections to hard-to-grasp concepts like compounding interest. Before now though, funding and implementation was left to individual teachers or schools to prioritize.

Samantha Desmarais teaches math, financial literacy and computer science at Central Falls High School, which serves predominantly low-income Latino and Black students in a working class city just north of Providence. She hopes the legislation will open the door to financial support from the state for credentialing and hiring, building more capacity to teach the subject.

Otherwise, she said, “there’s going to be disproportionality between the districts that are able to shimmy around their budgets or their staff and make it work, and the districts that are weighted under all of these other things.”

Desmarais teaches about three sections of finance per year; enrollment is always on the higher side even with its elective status, at about 25 to 30 students per class. This fall, she’ll also teach a section for language learners, which introduces students to American money systems and credit.

“If you enjoy learning something today, spread that news and talk about it with your friends. There’s no reason why talking about money has to be this taboo subject,” she tells her students.

Advocates say that personal finance education provides an opportunity for students to break down any stigmas about money conversations before they head into large financial decisions, like student loans, car ownership and credit card debt. Lessons learned may also make their way home and support families facing economic challenges.

“I look at the state’s implementation of this guarantee of a financial education as sort of being a gateway to some meaningful engagement with families,” said Pat Page, vice president with the Rhode Island personal finance coalition and a business educator.

Page, Rhode Island’s former teacher of the year, has been a vocal advocate for broader financial education for years, and was one of the first in the state to teach a standalone course. She supported students, including Sunny Sait, in testifying in favor of broader financial education to the state legislature — in 2014, 2019 and again in 2021.

Though Sait took Page’s class two years ago, he said he still uses the concepts daily. Currently on a gap year after graduating this spring, he’s opened up a Roth IRA, and budgets his internship paycheck to make sure he can still afford things he loves, like karate.

“My mindset definitely shifted a little bit from thinking of money in terms of things, but instead thinking of money as a means for growth, saving and investing. I really had my focus shift from purchasing, like being a consumer, to becoming an investor.”

Many describe the effort to make financial literacy a reality for all Rhode Islanders as both a grassroots and grasstops effort, pushed by students and teachers, but also state leaders, like Treasurer Seth Magaziner, who helped introduce the legislation.

“The strongest advocates who worked very hard to get this bill passed were teachers and students. Students who very much wanted this to be taught, and teachers who are ready to teach it,” said Magaziner, who began his career as an elementary school teacher and his run for governor.

The treasurer and education commissioner both see the law’s signing as phase one of creating a broader financial literacy landscape in the state — their hope is to expand lessons to middle and elementary grades. The education, Magaziner says, will make a particular difference in Rhode Island.

“We do have a large rolling immigrant population, students who are English language learners. We have one of the highest poverty rates in the Northeast. Financial education is not a panacea, it’s not a cure-all, but it is an important part of the puzzle for how we solve these inequities, and correct them.”