It's about making your students responsible, contributing members of their community.
A child can have solid reading, writing, and math skills, but if they cannot manage their money, they will struggle, even fail as adults. You can change that. You can give them the basic framework to make good financial decisions. Armed with this knowledge, they will become responsible citizens and contributors to their community. You can change their lives.
Parents
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Our increasingly sophisticated US economy has outpaced the knowledge of most Americans.
The area of personal finance has become complex.... and dangerous. Mistakes can be costly. Today's adults grapple with credit card debt, retirement planning, identity theft, credit scores, and even bankruptcy.
- Almost three quarters parents feel unprepared to teach their kids about personal finance.
- Over 80% of our nation's parents say they want solid personal finance courses taught in their children's schools.
Early Education About Basic Personal Finance Starts with You, the Teacher
Research shows that even a small amount of time spent teaching our kids about basic money management leads to a lifetime of good money management habits. Early intervention is the key to success.
"Children and teenagers should begin learning basic financial skills as early as possible. Indeed, in many respects, improving basic financial education at the elementary and secondary school level is essential to providing a foundation for financial literacy that can help prevent younger people from making poor financial decisions that can take years to overcome."
-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
Grades K Through 5 Are Your Window of Opportunity
The elementary years are the most impactful time to reach and teach children about money. Why?
- Young children have no preconceived notions about what they can and cannot learn.
- By kindergarten children are already experienced in spending their parents' and their own money. They are already consumers. Primary spending (what kids ages 8-12 buy with their own money) is $10 billion and climbing. Influenced spending (what parent's buy at kids' urging) is $250 billion and climbing.
- Marketers target children as young as 18 months. They don't wait. Do you want to teach them they have choices about money, or do you want someone else to?
- Spending habits are already set by high school, even middle school.
- Credit card companies, having saturated the college market, are now going after young teens and tweens.
Your State Probably Has Basic Personal Finance Curriculum Standards
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Forty states have personal finance standards or guidelines as of 2007. Your state may have no standards or they may be limited to only high school. Take a look at the national standards for Grades 4, 8 and 12 established by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literary. Also check out Jump$tart's state coalition for your own state. |
Download and read NCEE's 2007 state-by-state survey of economics and personal finance education in the nation's schools.
