Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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").
And while I'm in support of this, it's pathetic that we need classes to teach people such things; it shows how unintelligent most people are, and demonstrates further that schools are based on rote memorization.
I suppose you sprung from the womb, with a credit card, checkbook, investments all in hand, taxes paid up, retirement account established and ready to go?
Seriously, where do you suppose people learn stuff? Not everyone's parents are able to teach this kind of stuff, some scarcely know it themselves. What do you think education is for? If not teaching this, then what SHOULD they teach?
Its not like it is all expected to be taught to seniors in High school. It can be spread over many years. Just like everything else taught in public schools.
In sixth grade we had an investment chapter in one of my classes. We learned to to research stocks and bonds. We made investments (monopoly money). We tracked them every week through the newspaper. YES Newspaper. This was 1962 There was no internet. My parents never had enough to invest. They had no clue. I knew what a PE ratio was before I was out of grade school. (Didn't fully understand it, but knew where it came from and how to use it).
I just wish my mom had access to the water your mom drank. Maybe I would have sprung fully fledged into the delivery room, ready to go job hunting the next day.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.