WASHINGTON — In his middle school classroom, Bryan Martinez notes several purchases that require a short-term savings plan: shoes, phones, headphones, clothes and food.
His medium-term financial goals required some thought, but he chose a car — he didn’t have one yet — and went on vacation. Looking to her future, the 18-year-old also envisions saving money to buy a house, start her own business, retire, and perhaps provide college funds for any children.
Martinez’s friend next to him wrote a different long-term goal: Buy a private jet.
“You’d have to be a millionaire to save for that,” Martinez said with a laugh.
Call it a reality check or an introduction to critical life skills, this exercise takes place in a course called Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications. Elective math classes have been a mainstay of Capital City Public Charter Schools’ offerings for more than a decade, giving students a foundation in money management while they hone math skills. Conversations about credit, investments and loans, for example, intersect with lessons about compound interest, matrices and exponential equations.
Bryan Martinez, a senior at Capital City Public Charter School, works toward cars and vacations in his Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications class.AP
The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Collaborative members are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
Washington, DC charter schools may be the leaders in providing financial education, but in recent years, many others have followed suit. Since 2020, nine US states have adopted laws or policies requiring personal finance education before students graduate from high school, bringing the total to 30 states, according to the Council on Economic Education.
The surge comes as educators are scrambling to improve students’ math skills, which plummeted during the pandemic and have yet to fully recover. At the same time, a general dislike of mathematics remains an obstacle among young people.
But does a topic like high interest rates translate into higher interest among students? Tonica Tatum-Gormes, who teaches the course, says yes. He attributes better student engagement to them seeing the connection between math and their future financial well-being.
Students are beginning to understand that “yes, I need to learn decimals, and I need to learn fractions, and I need to learn percentages because I need to manage my money and I need to make loans,” Tatum-Gormes said.
Advocates say personal finance courses can pay dividends if students learn how to make smarter money decisions and avoid financial pitfalls. In the process, they may also develop an interest in mathematics because of its practical applications.
K-12 standards for personal finance education, as recommended by the Council on Economic Education, include topics such as earning, budgeting, saving, investing, and managing credit and financial risk. Experts say it’s a course that traditional math teachers don’t necessarily need to teach.
“The more math you add to financial literacy, frankly, the better it is,” says Annamaria Lusardi, founder and academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Center of Excellence. “In many cases, to make a decision, you have to do the math, so I think math is a very powerful tool. … Having said that, financial literacy is more than math.”
Idaho is one of the states where a new financial literacy curriculum is hitting classrooms. The State Assembly this year approved the course as a graduation requirement.
Tonica Tatum-Gormes leads her students through math problems in her Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications class at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington.AP
The new course will give students the opportunity to apply skills from their algebra, calculus and economics classes to their real lives — calculating their future student loans, rent payments and income needs.
“This is a priority because I heard from many people during last year’s campaign that our young people are not prepared with the basic financial skills they need to succeed in life,” said Debbie Critchfield, Idaho state superintendent. public teaching, which spearheaded the effort.
Experts say the subprime mortgage crisis that helped trigger the Great Recession in 2007, followed by today’s period of pandemic economic uncertainty and inflation, may have heightened Americans’ desire for sound financial understanding. Less than a quarter, or 24%, of millennials demonstrate basic financial literacy, according to the Council on Economic Education.
Advocates say that untaught, teens and young adults may turn to questionable sources, such as TikTok or YouTube videos. Additionally, children whose parents are not financially literate cannot rely on home learning, making it an equity issue.
In 2020, the NAACP issued a resolution calling for more financial literacy programs in K-12 schools.
At schools with predominantly black and Hispanic student populations that lack state-mandated requirements, only 7% of students have secured access to at least one semester-long personal finance course. That figure rises to 14.2% for schools with less than a quarter of students who identify as Black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by Next Gen Personal Finance, a nonprofit that advocates for financial literacy education.
Considerations of equity have been the driving force behind financial literacy courses at Capital City Public Charter Schools, which serve a student body that is 64% Latino and 25% Black.
“It’s an empowering course,” said Laina Cox, head of school. “I think it gives our young people the language they need and a voice when they’re in a certain room and at a certain table.”
In Tatum-Gormes’ classroom, conversations about savings goals turned into math problems on the whiteboard. He asked students to calculate how much a person would need to save to create an emergency fund that would cover three months’ worth of expenses.
As he nudges, students work out an equation, which he scribbles on the board. It’s early in the school year, but for students, the dollar value is already clear.
Martinez, who is one of nine children, said she signed up for the course because she saw her parents struggling to make ends meet. He hopes he left with the knowledge of when to spend — and not spend — money.
“I just want to prepare myself for what’s coming my way,” he said.
Sadie Dittenber of Idaho Education News contributed to this report.
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