New York Financial Literacy Standards and Mandates

Thank you for joining me as I review New York’s financial literacy mandates and standards. Now, I had high hope for New York. It’s the financial capital of the world, not just the U.S., of the world. A lot of industry money runs through. It’s the concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothing you can’t do in New York. Well, until it comes to their financial literacy mandates, what’s absolutely fail. Students will graduate unprepared for the financial realities of life. In addition, it doesn’t even come close to meeting minimum education standards. Let’s get into it. First, I’m going to break down Senate Bill 4860, last updated in 2023. And then I’ll get into the administration side, how the administrators are implementing financial literacy in the state. So let’s dive into the bill first off, and we’ll put a link in the show notes where this bill is. But the first part is, you know, they’re introducing financial literacy. It’s going to be a graduation requirement. Sounds great. I was off to a good start in New York. You’re looking good at that point. So it’s going to be a graduation requirement, but it doesn’t really state how long or the depth of the class required. We’ll talk about that on the administration side. So they’re not very specific. I like those when they’re very specific and tell administrators exactly what standards they need to meet. The only thing they did tell them is one of my biggest pet peeves. It is, they must teach, if you look at line item six there, they must teach, it says, which will include, but not limited to these topics, investments, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, debt management, checking, insurance, rights and obligation, tenant, basic concepts, drawbacks of leasing, purchasing automobiles. Now, already they’re just listing some random topics that aren’t required for students to make near-term financial decisions. And who put these together? There’s not cohesive. Every time you’re designing a program, any type of education program, it should be focused on outcomes first. What outcomes are you looking to achieve? And then backwards design it. They absolutely failed there with their directives. So they told the states that the administrators, nothing but some random topics to include. It gets worse when I talk about the administration side. So hold on. And the other thing I don’t like is they’re giving it the leniency that a student could take it in grades 9 through 12. Now, if we’re teaching students these concepts in ninth grade, they’re going to forget it by the time they need to use it in the real world. Ideally, financial literacy programs with scaffolds starting in elementary school, but in this case, high school, freshman year, and get increasingly harder in terms of time and rigor. So students are implementing what they’ve learned. and really capable of making those decisions that are coming up soon here. Then it gets into the next page, which talks about starting on a line on 13. The course shall be taught on a pass fail basis, but it won’t impact their GPA. And then basically instructing schools that they’ll provide the time, the place for instruction. So they’re giving them a lot of leeway as far as curriculum resources and so forth. So they give them a lot of leeway. And this is the bill. The bill is a page and just a page. It’s one page if I take out the header and intro. very little guidance from the policy side, an absolute failure. I’ve done business in New York, and I’ll tell you what, it’s a ridiculous state to do business in. It’s very tough. They tell you everything. It’s a lot of line items you’ve got to go through. But for something as important as mandating financial literacy standards across the whole state, they give you one page. I wish my dealings with them were this easy. But it’s not So let’s move into the standard side of things. And again, just to give you guys some ideas, you know, how this works is there’s policymakers that implement bills and they’re telling basically the school administrators on what is the minimum requirements, what the requirements are. So with this bill, there’s absolutely very little guidance. The only guidance they gave them was a random list of topics. So a major fail there. And let’s get into what the administrators are doing here. And one thing I want to go back because they didn’t even mandate this in grade school. But I want to talk on this because I’m glad. Let’s move to a little positive news here. that the career and technical education has a course on financial literacy for middle school. It’s not required. They can take other classes, but at least they put together something for middle school students. It doesn’t meet our standards of starting elementary school and continuing as it’s an elective, but at least the career and technical education is trying to incorporate this here. Now, they have some random topics. I don’t really like what they’re doing here, and we’ll get into the language using after I cover the high school standards here in a moment uh but uh you know they’re talking they’re starting to introduce some concepts a lot of them are well too advanced for middle school students nothing is really time relevant urgent also the language they’re using is way off but you can find that in the new york state middle level career and technical education this is updated in june 23rd um but our focus here is on the high school but again this was not any any part of the mandate so kudos for people to get this in as an elective through that let’s move on to the financial literacy part for high school now first i want to note that it’s a the financial education piece is a half of unit okay so that’s about 30 hours of training time the other half is made up of career education i personally consider that financial education as well, because you can’t teach people to manage money. You can’t teach people to invest and do all these other things unless they have income coming in. So it’s good. They have a career side of things. I wish it was separated into two distinct areas. So there’s a career training that starts young, that has an actually complete resume, go on interviews and things of that nature. But so they at least have some good, solid career education. I think more than most states, but again, I still think it’s lacking. Students graduate unprepared with the soft skills and after reviewing what they’re requiring in the career education piece, they’re lacking a lot of the soft skills and things needed to actually land a job, communicate professionally to bosses and so forth. But the other half is dedicated to financial management. Let’s see here. Yeah, so it’s a part of their career and technical education sequence. And again, the total financial side of things is about 30 hours. And yet in that 30 hours, I’m gonna go back here. This is the amount, it’s about 20 pages they expect to cover. I stopped counting at a hundred different topics. So they listed out topics that should be covered. It’s over a hundred topics that should be covered. Any teacher out there knows You cannot cover 100 topics in amount of depth and rigor that will produce any benefit. When you teach a bunch of random topics and you have to get through that very quickly, there’s going to be a very big problem, which is learning loss. They’re not learning at the depth that they need to to actually retain and apply that information. So much of what they’re listing here will be absolutely wasted, absolutely useless, will never make a difference in a young person’s life. They’ll graduate unable to make any financial decision because they’ll remember, oh, this was one of 100 topics that they had me cover, but they didn’t get into the depth of knowledge. And we can see this as well. Let’s take a look at the language used. So I’m going to read this from here because I can’t see too far. So if we just go through, identify, identify, explain, recognize, determine, describe, evaluate, examine, examine, review, explain, reflect, explain, identify. And why I’m saying that language is directly related to this next slide. These are education frameworks, right? They’re very well known. Every teacher knows them. A web’s depth of knowledge and also Bloom’s taxonomy of higher order thinking skill sets. If you look at the language they’re using, it’s all understanding, remembering, recall, and reproduction. Very low levels of learning. If I’m teaching a class that’s just getting them to that level, they may be able to pass the post-test exam, but they’re not going to be able to apply it in the real world. Again, just reading through, continuing amongst this 20 plus pages, identify, describe, identify, define, review, explain, explore, develop, identify, determine, recognize, explain, describe. It’s sad. Why isn’t there a create a budget? Why isn’t there build a financial plan? Why isn’t there analyze your financial goals? No higher order thinking skill sets. It makes me wonder there’s one of two things that happen here. Either one, the people designing this understood that the class is too uh too short in time and they’re never going to get them to higher order thinking skill sets or number two they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing in terms of education um either way it’s bad a quality educator if i’m doing a class where i have 30 hours of time i’m going to significantly reduce the topics focus on areas that I can get youth to higher order thinking skill sets. This way, they’re going to be able to remember and apply things when they get out in the real world. Random education, being able to pass quizzes absolutely will do nothing. The beauty of financial literacy education is the fact that they can actually apply what they’ve learned. It’s very hard if we’re doing science, right? How are they going to apply a science experiment or something of that nature, unless they’re going in that path? How are they going to apply math in their regular daily life besides simple addition, subtraction, percentages, et cetera. Geometry, right? It doesn’t happen very often unless you’re in specialized fields. Now, if you’re an engineer, yeah, you need geometry. But personal finance is a topic that every student can apply right now. something as simple and as fun as doing a project-based learning where they’re creating their budget when they move out of their house so they’re planning in advance they’re creating a budget maybe working with other people in the classroom determining what it costs and then going and having a blueprint so that they can apply it maybe it’s having them open up their proper bank accounts they have before they leave school maybe it’s creating a plan to pay for college and consider, you know, outlining and analyzing college options. All the terms I mentioned are higher order thinking skill sets, and yet The administrators, whoever built this, absolutely neglected a very basic and fundamental principle of any program design. Two things, backwards design. What are the real outcomes we’re trying to achieve? Is it just random knowledge? If so, they’ve succeeded. If it’s how do we make a real difference in students’ lives? They’ve absolutely failed. There’s no excuse for that. And I’d like to find out more. I have been in communication with that department. And even the list of, they sent me a list of free resources because New York is an unfunded mandate. They’re not getting special funding for financial literacy. They are getting it for their career and technical education. So they’re getting some funding through that, but it’s not mandated to fund specifically financial literacy. But They have random list of materials in the link. Wasn’t even working when they sent me from the, uh, I won’t mention his name, uh, N Y S E D dot G O V. Um, I have a book. I don’t know who that is. Uh, let’s see business marketing, education, current technical education email. So they’re missing the mark and it’s unbelievable that any educator, anybody building out. they spent a lot of time on this. I mean, it gets very detailed on random topics with very low order thinking skill sets, but absolutely no thought was into what do I want for these students? Do I want them to just garner random ideas or do I want them understanding core concepts? In addition, I think they introduce way too many advanced concepts that the students won’t need as far as investing in stock markets, things like that. I think it’s important if we have time If we had time, insurance, they talk a lot about insurance, stock market, investing and things like that. Now, if we had time where I knew every student can make decisions when it came to what do they do when that credit card offers come when they’re 18 years old? Do they have the right accounts? Do they know how to live independently? Do they have a career plan? Do they have these things in place? Once I know they have that, they’re solid there, they’ve demonstrated that they’re able to analyze and think on a very high level. Now we can get into those more advanced topics, right? But with introducing investing things, I think it’s good to lightly introduce them to it. So it excites them and encourages them to learn more. But again, most of that information will be absolutely lost on them in the future, which is sad. Let me move over to the ranking. As you could have guessed, the ranking won’t be too high for New York. And I won’t say I’m more critical of New York, but I do, you know, it is. When you have a state, if there’s a state that’s under economic duress, there’s a lot of states out there under economic duress, right? They don’t have the industry. They don’t have the money coming through the tax system. They don’t have that. New York does not have that problem. So I might be a little more lenient on a state that’s losing jobs. People are moving out. They’re in financial trouble, but New York has absolutely no excuse. There’s so much money that runs through the state, high tax dollars on that as well. They have no excuse. So let’s check this out. Is it delivered in a standalone class? Nope, it’s a fail. Now it’s mixed with career education, which I think kind of fits that. But when we’re talking about the personal finance topics itself, It’s intermingled and it should be in a class and it’s not integrated into other subjects as well. So when we have limited time, we can integrate personal finance into other topics like math. We can introduce it into other topics like economics in English. We have them writing papers on something financial literacy or financial related. So it’s easy to integrate that. No mention of that. That’s a bigness, especially when we’re dealing with 30 hours focus on the money management side of things. Absolute fail. Obviously, this is a fail here. Not enough time, not enough rigor. And even if people argue, hey, 30 hours is enough time. Well, It’s not enough rigor because they’re listening to 100 topics. You can’t get through that amount of topics with the amount of rigor you need to actually benefit from those lessons. So a major fail there. No mention of ongoing education. And today with technology, we have access and the ability to provide ongoing education to students throughout their next few years, even after they graduate. You know, if we’re looking at most topics in school, you go to elementary school, you go to high school, and if you go to college, you’re still getting those foundational topics taught. With financial literacy, it’s like, oh, hey, let’s throw in 30 hours here, and then that’s it. Good luck, right? So we need to do more, and there’s simple, easy ways to add ongoing education elements into this through technology. Very cheap, free even, if you will, and yet they missed a very simple, very simple target to do there. So a big fail. A relevant content that prepares students for near-term life events. Nope. In fact, they chose to introduce more advanced topics. Again, I’m not mad at that, but to introduce that, you need to have the fundamentals. If you get into student loan debt, your credit card debt and so forth, you’re never gonna be able to think about investing, right? For 10, 20, 30 years even. So they’re missing the mark on relevant content that helps address their near-term life events. when i look at designing curriculum i always look at what’s most important and urgent in a person’s life right now so if somebody’s let’s take adults for example if somebody’s house is being foreclosed on and they need education on what to do and what options they have i’m not going to introduce a stock market game to them right they won’t care They want to know, how do I protect my house? With kids, we know the major pitfalls they get into. I got into them. Maybe you got into them, right? A little debt, a little credit card thing, mismanagement money. It happens, right? When you’re younger, you just don’t know. So male, a big miss there. Proven curriculum that encourages higher order thinking skill sets? Absolutely not. There’s no curriculum standards. They’re giving people free resources and And that’s what they said in the email, but the link didn’t work. So there’s no resources that is quickly available. I did a search online. I saw a random list of free resources that they recommend teachers using. But again, when you’re using resources published by government organizations, financial institutions, there’s some biases inherent. And just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s good. You need to have quality proven material that has outcomes, clear outcomes, and has proven those outcomes time after time. Customized student lesson plans based on student needs fail there. If we just even look at New York City, there’s so much diversity as far as socioeconomic. You’re downtown Manhattan, a lot of money going on there. Things are expensive. You take the train up to Brooklyn, you take the train up to Harlem, you take the train, these other boroughs, right? It’s a completely different little area. It’s a really cool city, one of my favorite cities. But It’s very neat. And also not just the city. You look at upstate, you know, along the Canadian border, you look at, you know, all these other areas that are different. You know, you have the lower price and lower income people in certain areas out there. It’s very diverse. So why would we teach the same thing? It needs to be tweaked. It doesn’t need to be completely different curriculum, but it needs to be tweaked and modified based off that student’s experience and their socioeconomic status. So a major miss there. Courses led by highly qualified instructors. No mention of teacher training in anything, in nothing. Let me see on their email what they said to me here. Absolutely nothing. And we asked specifically about that. Any teacher can use the material. So no teacher training standards, no teacher requirements. And that’s a challenge. It’s a unique subject because there’s behaviors, emotions. Every student comes in with different financial goals, different parents, different upbringing, different socioeconomic status, different habits, behaviors that form from advertisers, social media, all these things are influencing them. And yet let’s not train the teachers. Let’s give them material. Now I can give a highly qualified educator that knows how to teach personal finance. the worst curriculum in the world, and they’re going to make that class good. I can give a teacher that does not know how to teach personal finance, doesn’t know the behavioral, emotional, psychological elements of money, the best curriculum in that class would not turn out good. Every study shows that I’ve seen teachers have the most direct impact on student achievement, and for them not to include anything on that is a major miss, a major failure. A program deployed and managed by experienced leaders just by looking at how the administrators wrote the standards and what they’re requiring. Obviously not. I have no idea what they were thinking. Why do you have 100 plus topics trying to cram in 30 hours? I’m going to try to be nicer. I always say, hey, I’m trying to be nice, but I can’t hold back on New York. I’m nicer on other states, but it’s a major failure. I could tell they put time into this. but who reviewed it who tested it anytime you’re rolling out standards or framework for learning it has to go through iterations and processes feedback from teachers is it too much is it too little where’s the survey when we went through our accreditation the the main thing that we have to do is get feedback by every stakeholder the learners the teachers test our framework remove what’s working you know enhance what uh remove what wasn’t working enhance what is working These are just basics of education. So major fail there. I don’t know who’s leading this, but take it with a grain of salt. A learner outcome focus and assess. They did mention there is a test required and they must pass it. It won’t impact their GPA, but that’s not, when we’re looking at personal finance, test content knowledge is very little. I can get anybody to pass a test. It’s very simple. Grill an information, have them memorize it and pass a test next week. Very simple. Anybody could pass the test. You know, basically my whole high school and college career was just cramming for tests and just passing. I never studied or anything like that. Know it for the day and move on. So, you know, the learner outcomes should include behavior measures, confidence and sentiment measures, how they produce anything of value, projects that could be created, projects rooted in the real world. So absolutely not have funding there. I mean, money’s coming in through the career and technical education. There’s no specific money allocated. I’ll give them a yellow thing there. Since we haven’t had any green checks here, there is a green check. They could earn that, but we haven’t had any success with green checks with New York yet. But because there is some money coming in there, we’ll give them a yellow check. or yellow a circle, which means average, right? It’s okay. Ideally, I’d like to see dedicated money for the financial literacy initiative. That way, if there’s cutbacks, we know there’s money going to be there for financial literacy. I’ll start fundamental lessons in elementary school. Now, you did see that the career technical education had some things, which is cool. I put that up there because of that, but it’s not mandated. And there are some other things that were mentioned in other social studies in elementary school. But again, because it’s not mandated, they don’t have to take it. I’m giving them a fail there. But again, thank you for those who put together those middle school standards. And really, I think financial literacy should start when behaviors start before behaviors form and financial behaviors form between seven and nine years old and youth. Several studies, one of the most popular Brown study, on 50,000 youth in regards to their work ethic, right? That formed by age nine. Other people point earlier, but they’re missing the mark there. It’s not required a major fail there, and encourage parental involvement with the resources. Nothing was mentioned. That’s a huge asset. I don’t know why schools think they’re so much better than parents and we’re the teachers, we’re gonna teach and they’re gonna do what I said. No, it’s critical you get parental involvement because they can help assist teachers so that the kids are getting these lessons on a regular basis And then they’re getting these again at school. And I think parents are the primary responsibility of financial education. School should be secondary, but I think schools play a pivotal role in getting parents involved, providing resources to parents, providing education. So New York, I don’t know. It’s a, what is it? Sad. Probably one of the worst states I reviewed. Others aren’t much better. So it’s not that big of a difference, but Again, very sad when you have a place with such high economic activity and yet fail to meet even the most minimal standards of education to serve them. want to provide some guidance for them as well so if anybody there in state is interested uh we do have uh the framework uh here uh that we provide so we’ve been asked by over uh 12 different state house or uh state representatives um and two members of the house of representatives to help them with their to uh back their financial literacy bill we said absolutely not We wrote the policy framework guide for legislatures and administrators to help guide quality programming. It’s available free. We’re here to help you guide and elevate those standards. Basically, the only two things we’re asking for, and I think it’s very simple, is number one, we need to meet the minimum education standards required by any other subject. Minimum education standards. Imagine trying to speak Spanish or any foreign language after 30 hours. You could not do it. So meet the minimum education standards. What does that mean? Quality teachers, trained, clear outcomes, quality tested material, the basics, the basic things on that checklist, nothing too crazy. Second, every student should graduate able to make near-term financial decisions. Any student taking the class will not be anywhere close to prepared to make that decision when that credit card comes in the mail, offer comes in the mail. When they turn 18, you know they get inundated What am I gonna do here? Oh, I get a credit card. Are they capable? Absolutely not. Are they capable to move out on their own? Absolutely not. Are they capable to make a student loan decision? Absolutely not. Do they know how to set up the key things to manage their money? Absolutely not. And it’s a big myth. So again, we’re not asking for anything too crazy just to meet the minimum education standards and prepare kids for the financial realities of life. As the financial capital of the world, you need to do better in New York. I hope we can help you elevate those standards. But until then, it’s a major fail. That concrete jungle where dreams are made of, you’re not going to be producing those dreams and those things that we have for those dreams we have for our youth with these types of standards. Let’s do better. Let’s elevate those standards. Let’s ensure every kid can live a happy, meaningful life.