Champlain College Center Grades 50 States on Personal Finance Education.

BOSTON - July 24, 2013 - PRLog -- Responding to a national need to produce more financially literate
citizens, Champlain College’s Center for Financial Literacy has issued
a report card that grades the 50 states in terms of their efforts to
strengthen personal finance education in high schools.

“The focus is on high schools because that is where data is and it’s
where personal finance education belongs,” says John Pelletier,
director of the center. “For many Americans, education stops at high
school.  A college education is not the solution. Very few colleges
offer a personal finance elective for student to take and just a few
institutions require personal finance instruction as a graduation
requirement.”

The state grades are based on financial literacy legislation summaries
maintained by National Conference of State Legislatures for the last
14 years and on reports issued by the Jump$tart Coalition and the
Council for Economic Education. Researchers at the center
double-checked inconsistencies with additional research, but the
grades are only as accurate as these public sources of information.
Inaccuracies could result in grades that are too lenient or too harsh.

“We were only able to give 40 percent of states grades that you would
want your children to bring home from school—grades A or B,” Pelletier
says. “My dream, of course, would be for all states to earn an A
grade. I hope that over the next year the states with grades C, D and
F will do much more to bring these critically important topics to
their high school students.”

The outlook in Massachusetts according to Declan J Sheehy, President
of the Massachusetts Jump$tart Coalition is an embarrassment and a
wake-up call for a state that is ahead of the curve in so many other
ways. The overall grade for our state is F; even though finance topics
are included in the state’s educational guidelines the state has no
requirement that school districts teach these topics. The is no
personal finance requirement, according to Jump$tart, though certain
schools do teach it as an elective. In Massachusetts, more than 20
bills have been introduced in the legislature since 2005 to make
financial literacy a requirement but all have failed. (Source: NCL
Summaries). The Massachusetts Jump$tart Coalition strives to promote
the teaching of personal finance in PreK-12 classrooms,  improve
teachers’ personal level of financial literacy. and introduce teachers to new information, techniques, and resources and to help them bring personal finance into their classrooms.

States with an A  Grade (7 States or 14%) Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana,
Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia.

States with a B Grade (13 States or 26%) Arizona, Colorado, Illinois,
Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.

States with a C Grade (8 States or 16%) Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky,
Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.

States with a D Grade (11 States or 22%) Florida, Maine, Maryland,
Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania,
Vermont and Wyoming.

Flunking States (11 States or 22%) Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas,
California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nebraska,
Rhode Island and Washington.