How would it be created?
The financial literacy course would be created by the Oregon Department of Education, wherein a committee of education professionals would work together to refine and settle on important topics or subtopics within financial literacy. The course will be created with the intention of eventually being distributed to every school district in Oregon, and subsequently every high school. The course would be an online module, using the popular learning platform Canvas.
What would it include?
The Canvas module will be interactive and have the ability to be taught in a classroom setting or remotely. The course itself will include a wide range of topics that involve personal finance, investing, retirement, credit, and debt. The course will be year-long, two semesters worth, and have tests and group evaluations to mark the progress of students in the class. Some of the interactive features will be mock stock market trading, like Investopedia, and online tax documents that give corrections as they are filled out. The module’s course calendar (see below) gives a tentative outline of all the topics intended to be covered within the course. Inspiration for the content of the course came from Khan Academy and The Ultimate Guide to Financial Literacy.
Key topics:
Personal Finances: Bills and Everyday Expenses:
Learning about bills and expenses and creating a budget incorporating these factors is often seen as intuitive, but it is a necessary skill to learn. As described in 6 Reasons Why You Need a Budget, creating budgets increases financial stability and establishes a long-term plan for large investments or emergencies while also managing day-to-day expenses.
Loans/Student Loans:
Loans are helpful towards achieving goals sooner and play a significant role in life after high school. Whether the loan is taken out to fund college or to fund another personal goal, it is important to understand what goes into taking out a loan (ie. the amount that is affordable to borrow, how much it will cost to borrow, etc.) to avoid making any costly mistakes.
Retirement Planning: 401k and IRA
According to CNN Money, retirement plans should be started in the 20-30 age range (when paychecks are beginning to be earned) as more time allows for the money to grow more. The time after high school graduation lines up with the suggested age range, thus learning what retirement planning is and how to get started is valuable.
Where and when would it be administered?
The financial literacy course will be administered during the 4 years of high school.High school students were chosen as the audience of the course because the program would be the most advantageous at this point in time. According to the article The Case for High School Financial Literacy, in 2015, 69% of students enrolled in college right after high school while 31% entered the workforce. In both cases, students need to be aware of how to handle living expenses and manage their finances in general. According to Statista, in 2020, around 90% of the U.S population have a high school diploma or more. Providing the financial literacy course in high school would cater to the majority of the population and allow for more informed financial decision making. High school students are also old enough to understand the material that is being taught and can apply the topics of the curriculum to decisions and actions they must apply in their own lives in the near future.
I recommend to copy/paste this table into the Page: (Course Calendar_Financial Literacy Course)
You said that this course was meant to help students in lower income households, but many communities do not have the resources for students to have a computer and stable internet connection. How do you propose this issue should be mitigated?
Since we are going directly to the administrative side of this with the proposal, there would be an expectation for individual school districts to navigate this. We did talk about it though. The course would not have homework if there were students that could not complete it outside of school. The course would be delivered in a computer lab, which almost every high school has. Resources like the nearest public library could also be utilized. Great question!
Has there been any research on how financial education effects poverty rates? While this knowledge is useful, it can be difficult to set money aside for budgeting or retirement while living on a minimum wage income. Is it fair to attribute poverty to a lack of education instead of systemic injustices?
How does your proposed curriculum correlate with the federal National Standards for Personal Financial Education curriculum as per the Council for Economic Education?
Consider making course modules for Canvas and Blackboard that can be imported into a school’s iterations of either app, so that the state isn’t funding the use of those apps. I suspect each district chooses its own course/learning management system (CMS/LMS), so paying for Canvas separately doesn’t need to be a line item in your grant proposal.
Is the 1-year timespan so that students can see how much they’ve earned, saved, and spent? Or is that timeline needed just to teach all of the required topics, or both?