Charita Goshay: Financial literacy law is a good idea

In the raft of bills being proposed in Columbus, Senate Bill 1 has been approved and will require students to take 60 hours of instruction in financial literacy to graduate, starting in 2022.

The bill proposed by State Sen. Steve Wilson includes funding to pay teachers to become certified to teach the course.

Ohio schools have offered financial literacy courses on an elective basis for decades, but the bill would make it mandatory to take a half-credit of financial literacy to meet graduation requirements.

Wilson, who works as a banker, has said the goal of the bill is to demystify how money works.

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Ray Martinez, president EVERFI, a financial education company, has been pushing for states to add financial education requirements for 20 years. Martinez said 135,219 students in Ohio have used EVERFI Financial Literacy since the 2016-2017 school year. Last year, 437 schools offered an EVERFI course taken by 46,344 students

"The core educational curriculum in our country was designed to teach students reading, writing, and math," he said. "Subjects like science and social studies were deemed critical and added as well but the curriculum has never been focused on critical topic areas like the importance of your credit score, the power of compounding interest, identity protection, how a mortgage works, and other pocketbook issues."

Martinez said the number of school systems that have added financial education has increased since the financial crisis of 2008, noting that nearly 45 states have made it a requirement or recommended it as part of their learning standards.

Martinez said financial literacy tends to be entrusted to parents, but not everyone is equipped to offer their children advice on money.

"Instead of incorporating this critical education into schools, we’ve relied on parents to take on the responsibility of teaching this content to their children," he said. "Unfortunately, there is an economic divide in this country and when you expect parents to take care of teaching this material at home, you only widen that divide between those who are equipped to have the conversation and those who are not.

"In fact, as we’ve worked to bring this education into the classroom we’ve heard from students who are taking what they are learning home and teaching their parents versus the other way around."

Martinez argues that financial literacy education should be taught on a continuum like math and language arts.

"We believe that it should be taught to kids from a young age," he said. "It’s important that we arm our youngest learners and our most at-risk communities with the education they need to drive ecosystems of change to break the repetitive cycles we have seen for generations."

Martinez said financial education resources exist that make it easy to implement it into the existing curriculum.

"We don’t anticipate any resistance (from teachers) because we know schools across Ohio have been teaching this topic already and have found ways to work it into their curriculum," he said. "We’ve worked with school districts to make the implementation of this education easy. For one Ohio school district, we created curriculum alignment guides for both social studies and business-content areas, to ensure teachers had access to EVERFI's financial education resources and had a clear understanding of how they can leverage these tools in their classroom instruction. We also work very closely with family and consumer science teachers across that district, who regularly implement several EVERFI resources."

Martinez said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is among those encouraging schools to offer financial literacy curricula.

"There is a shared responsibility amongst school districts, the state, and the federal government to determine what topics should be covered in schools," Martinez said. "While this occasionally goes top-down from the federal government, it's local and state boards that control the curriculum and it’s often either the legislature or the state department of education that requires this education, but it’s not just a state-level initiative.... While it’s not up to the federal government to set curricula across the country, Secretary Cardona is encouraging states and districts to include better financial literacy courses and programs for students. In fact, just last month senators from both parties introduced a bill that would require students to take a financial literacy class to then be eligible for a financial matches savings pilot program."

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and a member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Literacy education now a requirement for Ohio students