Pennsylvania Financial Literacy Mandates

Welcome and thank you for joining as I review Pennsylvania’s financial literacy mandates and standards. We’ll get into this before I do. I always like to say for those that have led the charge to get these standards into schools, I thank you, but this is a critical review. No state that I’ve reviewed so far can meet two minimum standards. Number one, meeting the minimum education standards of other topics required in school. No state comes remotely close. And number two, no state adequately prepares youth for the near-term financial challenges. Things like what happens when they turn 18 and get a flood of credit card applicants? What happens when they move out on their own? How do they make a college loan decision? No student graduates prepared to even make those basic decisions. I’m appreciative of these standards, but this will be a critical review. And let’s dive in. As I review the bill, in addition, they also wrote up an education framework for schools. So I’ll review both of those because they work together. This on the policy side, this on the administration side. So let’s dive in. Let’s look first at the bill. And I just put this page up there to let you know what version I’m using. But I found an interesting thing right here. March 10th, 1949. So they’ve been adding to this bill over the years. And this isn’t just financial literacy. It really dictates what’s going on in schools. But it’s interesting to think that in this total document size is about 130 pages. It’s interesting to think with all the major changes since the 1940s, major changes, they’re still just modifying existing guidelines for schools. You would think with the advent of computers and other major innovations since the 1940s, it would be a complete overhaul. Instead, schools still teach the same subjects they did 100 years ago. That’s an aside. Let’s dive into the actual bill. This jumps ahead to page 112 for those that are following along. Essentially, it starts off with just outlining that there is a personal finance program required. And there’s a current curriculum and standards that the Department of Education in Pennsylvania created over the years. So the first one was in 2014. They outlined a framework, which was called the model curriculum. And they’ve been updating that through the year. So a lot of this is talking about making sure that’s updated and making sure it’s distributed to schools, which I think is good. It’s always good when they start with a framework and making sure it can be distributed. So I think that’s a good place to start. We get into a little more meat here on page 113, the very top. I like this a lot. They say, including the basic principles involved with earning, spending, saving and investing money. Now, why do I like this? A lot of states, the politicians will list 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 topics for them to cover. And the common language is schools must teach these topics. Right. So it’s required. The politicians are requiring schools to teach certain topics. Now, they don’t know much about teaching personal finance in many cases, so for them to mandate topics I don’t think is good. We look at Massachusetts, Bill, they’re mandating teaching online stock trading and cryptocurrency. That can be very dangerous to teach to a 16, 17, 18-year-old, right? In Florida, they’re mandating teaching what to do with inheritance money. Now, that may not apply to the whole class. So I like when they leave it open and available for the administrators to decide on what’s most important for schools to teach. I do like loose guidelines there. And basically down line eight was talking about updating the model curriculum as well. You’ll hear this quite a bit through this this bill. And that was, again, created in 2014. Moving on to the next page. And that’s really all that page says. And you can read the bill more in depth if you do like. And it’s basically talking about distributing the model curriculum again. It’s just basically, hey, they need to maintain and distribute it. That’s really all they’re saying. So a lot of repetition in those first few pages. But again, I did like that they did not list a bunch of random topics. Here’s where we get a little deeper in. They are, if you look at line item four, provide a mandatory course in personal financial literacy. Wonderful. With a value of at least one half credit or half a full credit. So a half a credit in Pennsylvania is 60 hours. What that really translates to in teacher language is about 50 hours because you need to account for administration time, students goofing around time, Bell periods, all that fun stuff that occurs during a normal class, about 50 instructional hours. Now, I did not see them say standalone. So this is a mandatory course, but they did not have the word standalone. I did not see that anywhere throughout here. So with the bill, at least on the bill side, not the administration side, this could be really, they have the freedom to integrate it into any other coursework. We’re big advocates and proponents of standalone coursework so they can get the focus, time, and rigor. And also students understand the importance of the course when it is standalone. So I think a big missing word there. The other thing I don’t like here in line seven, it allows them to complete the course in grade nine, 10, 11, or 12. Now, why is that bad? Because if I’m teaching a freshman these topics, By the time they’re needing to utilize this material, now they might be able to use some basic budgeting and things, but by the time they’re making decisions on moving out on their own, on going to college and these different major decisions, oftentimes they can forget that, especially over a span of four years. I like if we’re having limited time, which this is only one semester, very limited. It needs to be in the later years so they can actually apply what they learn. And that actually does a lot to reduce learning loss as well. So again, a line seven is very problematic there for me. Moving forward, I’m going down the line. Let’s see, let’s skip that page because a lot of it is, I think the one part I like is they’re going to, uh, uh, You work with outside agencies to help craft and refine the model curriculum and education materials. I think that’s good. I think that’s great. And a big problem I had with the model curriculum, they don’t list who has been involved in there. We scoured the internet and looking for that reach to that conclusion. We couldn’t find that in the document itself. It stayed in nowhere. So I like when there’s transparency so we can evaluate the quality of who’s putting those materials together. But I do like the fact they mentioned they’ll work with outside agencies. I think that is critically important. And then finally, on this page, we have they’re talking about teacher training, and they’re leaving it up to the schools to decide on what types of certifications that teachers need, but they need to have at least some knowledge in or have their teaching credentials in. uh family consumer science business computer information technology math and social studies which that’s just any type of teacher now it’s critical they missed a key thing teaching personal finance is different they need to provide instructor in-depth and comprehensive education on how to teach it’s different all those subjects they mentioned and here’s a one main reason why Rich D’ Every student in there has different habits relationship with money different goals different financial situations socio economic background. Rich D’ It takes a really good understanding of behavioral finance principles education methodologies and how we adapt that to personal finance. and many other factors there that aren’t taught in traditional coursework. There’s a huge emotional attachment to that, and it’s related to people’s esteem and overall well-being. And there’s a huge risk when the teachers aren’t trained on how to teach the subject matter. So it’s a big missing piece in there. And again, it continues with the teacher education piece there. And, you know, in here, really, it’s a lot to protect the current teachers, you know, because with the They’re not allowing outside teachers that have a specialty in teaching personal finance to come in and teach. And this is often due to teachers unions. They want to maintain control of the teachers. They have to go through their process of protocols. So it’s always a big fight to get really you can have a more highly qualified teacher that hasn’t taught. doesn’t have a traditional high school teaching license that is more competent and efficient teaching. So some problems there. Again, things I like, I like that they gave them some flexibility. I don’t like the fact that they didn’t require a high level of teacher training, which we all know teachers are the biggest indicator of student success. They are giving them freedom between 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade. And it’s not a standalone class. It was not mentioned in the bill. Maybe on the administration side, they’ll address that. But at least with the bill, they did not. So on the bill side, not looking too good. But whenever you’re enacting any type of education policy, there’s the policy side. And then we have the administration side, which I’ll get to now. And you heard them talk about the model curriculum quite a bit. i’m glad they they actually have that a lot of states what happens is they’ll just list a bunch of topics they’ll give it to the administration and the administration will say hey teachers go teach us here’s some free resources find them online at least this administration went through and has a a pathway in guidelines for those teaching which is supposed to be on learner outcomes but there are some major problems there as you will see first problem is The bill, I’ll say about 20 times, referred to model curriculum, right? And that there’s model curriculum formed in 2014. The new name as of 2024 is academic standards for personal finance. So if I’m a teacher and if you look at the Google results, the first two are number one and number three results are the 2014 standards that come up. The middle one doesn’t really have any links to this. So it’s problematic. What teachers do when they’re lesson planning, if you’re not a teacher, you probably don’t know this, but oftentimes they’ll look up online. Yeah, sometimes there are department sites and things you’ll look up to, but oftentimes those are very complex to navigate. A lot of teachers rely on Google and similar. The first thing there is model for curriculum. They mentioned 20 times in that model or in the book that I’m going to be teaching the old standard. So the basic housekeeping and cleaning that need to be done there to help. The real problem is with the actual . So I’ll give you examples through the document and a few good things as well. The first thing the first big problem is in this document academic standards for teaching for personal finance the list 62 lessons with over a hundred subtopics, right? That’s a lot to cover in only 50 teachable hours again 60 hours, which is the class but really teachable hours is about 50 teachable hours and There’s no way you can cover that with the degree of rigor and depth required to make any meaningful difference. It’s way too many topics, way too many subjects, and they don’t fit together. What I mean by that, there’s no cohesive vision behind it. Let me give you an example. A great vision would be for high school students to bring everything together under a vision of making themselves sufficient so they can move out and gain independence, right? That’s a very cohesive vision. Then everything fits under there. It’s a principle of backwards design, basic education principle that they fail to even think about or address. So big problem there. Additionally, as you read through this document, most of the language is low order thinking skill sets. As you see here, understand, define, explain. All those things are very low level skill sets. And these two principles, these two frameworks are Bloom’s taxonomy of higher order thinking and Webb’s depth of knowledge. Every teacher’s familiar with that. But again, when they built the standards, they did not rely on that at all. There’s a few examples where I thought were good. I’ll point out in a second, the majority was all low level skills. The problem is when you’re teaching low level understanding recall reproduction, they’ll be able to pass a post-test But it’s not going to be able to benefit them in their life in long term. Learning loss is steep. They don’t know how to apply it. They don’t have the confidence in executing. Where when we have them creating and planning, executing, analyzing, those are high order thinking skill sets that last longer. And we can actually have them apply things that they’re learning that are relevant in their life in the near term. Again, that’s why I’m an advocate of if we’re only going to do one semester, making sure it’s later in their career. Let’s look at, this is the first one came up and a few good things here. I like the fact that they laid out standards for kindergarten through 12th grade. Wonderful job. I didn’t see any mention of elementary school education in the bill. So administration, excellent job on expanding that vision. I think there’s a huge need and I like how they broke it down. It’s broken down based on their cognitive abilities, also their developmental states. That’s very key. So that’s a positive. I saw a lot of bad things. First, let’s look at K through second. I’ll get into my main focus here is on the high school standards, but let’s look at K through second first because it’s way too advanced. Throughout this whole document, it’s way too advanced. Let me read this for you. Identify short-term financial goals and steps people can take to achieve them and explain how limited personal finance resources affect choices people make. Way too advanced. K through second. In addition, whoever wrote this needs to understand at that developmental stage, these kids are selfish, not knocking kids. That’s just how they are at the developmental stage. Me, mine, I, right? That’s how they are. And it’d be very easy to adapt these to be like, you know, asking the kids in class, hey, do you have any, you know, what grade do you want for this class? Right. Oh, I want a I want to be OK. That’s a goal. So we need to bring it down to a personal level. We need to explain what goals are first. We’re just jumping to identify short term financial goals. Well, we need to identify what goals are in a way that they’re comfortable with. We can’t introduce finances into this until their understanding of what a goal is on a personal level. Then we can say, are you going to be in sports? Okay. What type of, what are your goals there? Hey, does anybody, anybody saving money here? Okay. What are your goals or what are you trying to save for? Right. And then we can explain that’s a goal. So the standards is written way too advanced. The other major problem is skip to grades nine through 12. They start at a place where it’s too high. These standards are meant to guide teachers. It should provide step-by-step guides as far as the skills that the students need to develop to have a clear outcome. They fail to do so. They jump right ahead. So assume a 10th grader has no idea on goals, has no idea on opportunity costs or understand process of writing goals, right? Assume that, which a lot won’t. High order thinking skillset. Create your personal goals, right? Now, we can’t just start there. I think the standards as written for K through second, third through fifth, sixth, eighth, should all be ninth through 12th. The reason being, even if I’m teaching this in the third grade, describe reasons people set financial goals. Developing reasons is critical in teaching personal finance. It’s one of the most important things that needs to be done to teach personal finance or any subject. By the time, you know, 10 years later, they’re going to forget the reasons to set goals. And if we don’t include that, hey, develop reasons to set financial goals in that training when they’re in high school, they are no way they’re going to.