North Carolina Becomes 7th State To Prioritize Financial Education By Making It a Graduation Requirement - Here's 5 Ways That NC Teachers Can Prepare!
North Carolina is now just the 7th state to require personal finance for all high schoolers.
HB924, a multi-faceted education bill including language around financial education in the state, passed through both houses of North Carolina's state assembly in June 2019, then received Governor Roy Cooper's signature on July 8, 2019.
The law states that the Board of Education "shall require during the high school years the teaching of a full-credit course focused solely on Economics and Personal...
Special Broadcast: NGPF, JumpStart and Champlain College Leaders Discuss the State of Financial Education on NPR
Can you imagine a better panel to discuss financial education in schools than NGPF’s Co-Founder Jessica Endlich, Jump$tart's President and CEO Laura Levine and Champlain College’s Director of Financial Literacy John Pelletier? They recently appeared on the NPR 1A podcast where the topics ranged from how personal finance should be taught in schools to the investment in professional development required to run effective programs to how this coursework...
Schools in the News (January 2019)
Sauk Prairie School District partners with business community (The Sauk Prairie Eagle)
“The Sauk Prairie Economic Empowerment Project was created about six years ago with the mission to help prepare youth for college, the job market and social interactions they are likely to encounter in the future. The two-day program is held in conjunction with Sauk Prairie High School economics teacher Joel Chrisler’s [Editor: Joel is an NGPF Fellow] unit on careers. The idea came after a...
Interactive Monday: Maternity Leave Policies
Hat tip to Jessica for pointing out this interactive that compares company maternity leave policies in a visual way:
It took me a minute to orient myself to this bubble chart. This chart represents the maternity leave policies of over 1,800 U.S. companies with the size of the bubble representing the number of weeks of paid maternity leave provided. The 0's on the perimeter of the circle are all the organizations with 0 paid time maternity leave policies. As your scroll down the page, you...
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks to Colorado Changemakers Debbie Pierce and Alyssa Wooten
States legislators and education leaders make decisions to emphasize financial education but then what? Anyone experienced in education or business, for that matter, knows that success requires keen attention to detail when it comes to implementation of a new program. Debbie Pierce from Economic Literacy Colorado and Alyssa Wooten from the Colorado Dept. of Education have teamed up to both increase access and improve the personal finance instruction taught in Colorado schools. Listen as they...
Best of 2018...Most Engaging Blog Posts
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jan 01, 2019
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Personal Finance, Credit Cards, Cryptocurrencies, Behavioral Finance, Policy, Paying for College
Happy New Year! Continuing the "Best of 2018" theme, I wanted to share with you the blog posts that engaged readers the most in 2018. To measure engagement I focused on two factors. I looked for pages that attracted hundreds of visitors and had the highest average time spent per page. Time spent on the page was a good indication that educators/students read the blog post in its entirety and engaged in the mini-activity described in it. For those new to NGPF, several of the posts below are...
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks to Aaron Standish About Implementing Financial Education In Palm Beach County School District
In 2013, Florida passed a state law which required embedding personal finance into the Economics course. That was about the same time that Palm Beach County School District received a grant to implement a K-12 strategy for financial education. They plucked Aaron Standish from the classroom to lead this important effort. Aaron shares his insights on the keys to a successful implementation, how he supports and develops district educators and the criteria he uses to evaluate curriculum. In...
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks to Brookings Institution's Matt Kasman About the State of Financial Education
We have seen some recent progress in states increasing access to financial education. In some cases, we see legislation at the state level (top-down) and in other situations, it is grassroots efforts at the school or district level (bottom-up). Tim talks to the Brookings Institution's Matt Kasman, who is out with a new research report that makes an important contribution to the existing literature on state-level efforts to improve financial education. Matt shares the results of his study as...
What I Learned Reading the State Auditor's Report About Financial Education in Utah
As most folks interested in financial education are aware, Utah generally scores high in any state-by-state comparisons of the commitment to financial education earning an A+ from Champlain College and identified as one of only five states with a standalone personal finance course requirement in the NGPF Access To Financial Education study. So, I was excited when the publicly available Utah State Auditor's report crossed my desk (or more accurately appeared in my inbox). I immediately...
FinCap Friday: The Credit Deep Freeze
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Sep 13, 2018
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FinCap Friday, Credit Reports, Current Events, Credit Scores, Policy
This week's FinCap Friday focuses on the one year anniversary of the great Equifax hack (not so great if you were one of its victims) and a new regulation to help protect the minors in your class:
New to NGPF's FinCap Friday? It's a fun way to engage your students with current events and includes:
A five question Kahoot!
A 90 second video providing details about the current event and explaining why it matters to students
A discussion prompt
Activity ideas to extend the learning...
Schools in the News: State policies, teacher PD and Wise Students
TN Treasurer visits Elizabethton to launch financial literacy program (Elizabethton Star):
Through the program, each classroom sets up their own mini-economy where the children take on different roles such as merchants, bankers, and other professions to learn about earning and spending money. Students will also learn about evaluating expenses from a needs versus wants perspective, as well as financial topics such as loans, interest, and inflation. In the classrooms where the program has...
The "States" of Financial Capability
Last December, the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College issued a report card on U.S. states and their personal finance education offerings in high schools. At that point, only Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia and Utah received “A’s,” signifying that they require 60+ hours of personal financial instruction for graduation. Utah got an “A+” because they also require students to pass a state test on the subject.
However, there has been progress...
Digging Deeper: Money and Gender Part I – the Pay Gap
Apr 30, 2018
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Research, Career, Current Events, Employment, Personal Finance, Policy
Two events in April brought the issue of gender pay gap into the headlines this past month. The first was the April 4 deadline for all companies in the United Kingdom to report on pay by gender in their companies. (Apparently, it is against the law to pay different rates/salaries by gender, but the government agency responsible for enforcing this is woefully short of staff and funding.) For those reporting by the deadline, 80% in fact pay men more. This has brought the issue...
What's the Catch?: The Case of Golden Valley Loan Company
If they won't regulate, we better educate.
Listening to Planet Money podcast (20 minutes) last week about an online lender, Golden Valley Loan, Inc. It was being sued by CFPB for "unfair, deceptive and abusive business practices." Under new CFPB leadership, the lawsuit has been dropped.
So, I went to Golden Valley's website to read the fine print of their short-term, high interest loans to see if I could find the "gotchas."
What a beautiful website...
Here's how they...
Schools in the News (late February)
By Tim Ranzetta
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Mar 01, 2018
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Schools In News, Professional Development, Policy, Personal Finance
Here's what's happening with personal finance across the country:
Will the state of Florida require a personal finance course? (Tampa Bay Online):
Hukill, a Port Orange Republican, has been pushing to get this information into teens’ hands for five years. Her bill would remove the financial literacy material currently in the state’s basic economics course, and create a separate half-credit course that students would have to pass in order to graduate.
NGPF Fellow, Jill Wilson,...
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