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Oklahoma Schools Required To Teach Students Personal Finance
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Paula Burkes reports that under legislation passed in 2007, Oklahoma students, effective this May, now must demonstrate an understanding in banking, taxes, investing, loans, insurance, identity theft and eight other areas to graduate. The intent of personal financial literacy education is to inform students how individual choices directly influence occupational goals and future earnings potential. Basic economic concepts of scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, and cost/benefit analysis are interwoven throughout the standards and objectives. 'Oklahoma has some of the strongest standards in the country,' says Amy Lee, executive director of the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education, which lobbied for and helped develop the curriculum. 'Where other states require four or five standards regarding earnings, savings and investing, Oklahoma has 14 standards including three that are state-specific: bankruptcy, the financial impact of gambling and charitable giving.' The law is designed to allow different districts to implement the curriculum in different ways, by offering instruction in various grade levels, or by teaching all the curriculum in a single class or spreading it across several courses. 'The intent of this law was always to graduate students out of high school with a strong foundation in personal financial literacy to reduce the many social ills that come from mismanaging personal finance,' says Jim Murphree. 'I cannot think of anything that we teach that is more relevant.'"
Maybe students will fully understand the ramifications of going deep in to debt to with student loans.
I can get behind this type of teaching. As the summary states, there is nothing more relevant to someone graduating from high school with no real experience or specific working knowledge that is not self-taught.
It's actually unfortunate that they left it up to the districts as that means there will inevitably be multiple districts where it is planned, or taught, by someone who has no clue about it themselves.
When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.
"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"
"No Mike."
"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."
"No Mike."
I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!
The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."
She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.
I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.
I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.
But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.
The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.
Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.
I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.
But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.
However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.
If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.
Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.
When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.
Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Thusly, I wonder how politically neutral this implementation is...
personal finances courses tend to be:
how to make a budget
how to balance a checkbook (even though nobody uses them)
how credit card interest works
how car loan interest works
how leasing works
how home mortgages work
how bank interest works (or in today's banks doesn't)
some very introductory stuff on investments (ie what are bonds, gics, stocks, dividends, mutual funds, etc).
And I would hope in today's versions they talk a bit about things like payday loans.
Its pretty practical stuff largely divorced from any economic theory.
We used to have civics classes back when I was in school. We learned about the Federal, State, County and City governments, their structure, how you can interact with government, etc. Too many people are so clueless about how it all works they shouldn't even be allowed to vote (although most of them probably don't).
You know, I count myself firmly as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but one of the strong suits of conservatism as a philosophy is a belief both in the value of self-reliance and self-responsibility, especially in a financial realm. I have no surprise seeing this come from a red state, and I wish more states would embrace such a curriculum.
It's irresponsible that we don't teach kids how to manage money, and it's a good place to get in their heads that math is useful for something, even if they don't like it. We need a society that values saving and long-term rewards over short-term consumption.
We spend too much time thinking of the other side as "the enemy" because of "wrong" beliefs that don't match our own and not enough time looking seriously at their strengths and how we can embrace those as common values -- places where we need to step up our own game in a bipartisan fashion.
So, good for you, Okies. May this be an example for the rest of us.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Rules to teach your kids:
1. NEVER own a credit card. They serve no purpose and the fact of the matter is, if you use one responsibly (only in emergencies) the credit card company will cancel your card for lack of use after a few months anyway. Trust me, I tried for years to keep one but even with an 800+ credit score they'd cancel it every time.
This is terrible advice. Using a credit card responsibly doesn't mean "only for emergencies," it means "only for expenditures you would have otherwise, and COULD HAVE OTHERWISE, paid for with cash." Pay your bill on time, you pay zero interest, and get cash back.