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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.
Absolutely. Long overdue.
step in and cry foul that schools shouldn't be teaching kids to be wise with the finances as it will upset the delicate balance of free enterprise.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Hopefully this will help reduce the divorce rate.
Divorcé's Guide to Marriage - Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces
Money was the No. 1 point of conflict in the majority of marriages, good or bad, that Dr. Orbuch studied. And 49% of divorced people from her study said they fought so much over money with their spouse—whether it was different spending styles, lies about spending, one person making more money and trying to control the other—that they anticipate money will be a problem in their next relationship, too.
Many marriages today are 'til debt do us part
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
When my parents were in high school and college, "Home Ec" classes were actually about home economics (ranging from budgeting to investments to the consequences of bankruptcy and even to running a home business). By the time I was that age, those subjects were all but gone (at least in the area I went to school, namely western Washington state) and what vestiges of them were left seemed to be about... cooking, or something. Nobody really talked about them, except in a disparaging voice intended to deride girls who had no real place in the school so they took "home ec" because that was all they could manage. Yes, they really were that sexist about it, too.
I've often thought it was a pity that *real* home economics classes - the kind of things that every adult ought to know, but so few people apparently learn - really ought to be standard material. What are the various kinds of investment accounts, and what are their tradeoffs? How can you calculate how much stock options are likely to be worth at a company? What is a "short sell" and why should or shouldn't you do them? What does it mean to "refinance" a loan, and when can or should you do it? How do you compare salaries in areas with different costs of living? When is renting a home more cost-effective than buying one? What kinds of things impact your credit score in what ways? How expensive of a car can I afford? Is it better to get a short loan or a long one (or none at all) in various common scenarios? Why is it better to diversify investments?
These aren't business major questions. You don't need a degree in economics to understand them. They don't even require advanced mathematics, certainly nothing above a typical high school curriculum. At least some of this material is highly likely to be useful to literally every single competent (as in, doesn't need a full-time caregiver) adult, and in a capitalist society, the costs of *not* knowing it can be severe.
Despite that, we don't usually teach those subjects in school. I got a bit from my parents, a bit from some extraordinary teachers I had prior to high school, a tiny bit from an intro econ class in college (said class focused more on theoretical economics, not on the real-world stuff), and a bit more through independent research... and I'm still not confident that I can answer all the questions above (I intentionally included some that I've been meaning to read up on in the future). I've been out of college for four years now...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...