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Financial literacy is great. Compelling him with an electoral initiative is not

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Sometimes when I take a Lyft to LAX, the driver asks what I do. If I tell the truth and say that I am an education professor, I will almost always regret it because I will immediately receive a variety of (often) uninformed and inaccurate ideas about what is wrong with schools and how to solve the country’s educational problems. . Everyone has studied it, and almost everyone knows — or thinks they know — what needs to be fixed.

This is the context in which I have been thinking about the California Personal Finance Education Initiativea measure placed on the November ballot that demand High schools offer and students take a semester-long personal finance course.

Of course, I am in favor of greater financial literacy. Many Americans lack these skills, leaving them at a serious disadvantage. It’s important to understand things like saving for retirement (many people I don’t understand the idea of ​​compound interest), how to pay taxes (many people don’t follow how tax brackets work) and how to avoid predatory lenders (many people fall victim to onerous bank fees and credit card companies). High school might even be a good place to teach these skills – there are some decent courses evidence that financial literacy can improve personal finances behaviorshow to save.

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But I will vote against the ballot initiative. There are several reasons why I oppose this, related to the idea of ​​mandating curriculum through voting in general and this specific initiative in particular.

The main general reason I oppose this initiative is that it sets a terrible precedent. While we may all like financial literacy, it’s not hard to imagine future ballot initiatives that try to change the curriculum in ways we might not like. Referendums could attempt to remove race and LGBT-related content from the curriculum, require abstinence-centered sex education, or ban environmental content in science classes. Education policy is already much like a pendulum, giving educators whiplash with ever-changing demands. The last thing we need is to accumulate new mandates through popular vote – and ballot measures, in particular, are notoriously difficult to undo.

Another general reason I oppose this initiative is that California already has pathways for creating education policies that are subject to electoral accountability, and elected officials should be allowed to do their work. There’s the governor and the state legislature, plus the state board of education and more than 1,000 local school boards. If voters want their government officials to do something about a curriculum issue, they can lobby for change or vote them out of office. In fact, the legislator has already been active in this area, with new curricular requirements in ethnic studies and computer science and a financial literacy proposal very similar to the one being voted on.

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Additionally, state government legislators, boards, and executives are much better positioned to pass rules that make sense in the context of existing education policies. In this case, for example, California high school students you already have to save money, and this course covers many of the same topics as the proposed new mandate. Why not simply improve the list of subjects that need to be included in the economics course, rather than adding another partially duplicated requirement? The California Department of Education can also work to ensure that adequate supports are provided to teachers – especially high-quality curriculum materials that align with new expectations – so that financial literacy classes don’t become just another complicated burden to understand. and no funding for students. educators.

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As for the details, I’m not opposed to teaching students financial literacy, but it’s important to consider the tradeoffs in terms of what will be replaced. With substantial declines in achievement in math and English language arts and the widespread school shutdown, I am concerned that new course requirements could distract from the educational core.

And while financial literacy is great, it is no substitute for more direct actions the government can take to help people make better, easier decisions. We can teach children to pay taxes, but we can also increase direct archiving which saves taxpayers from unnecessary fees from for-profit tax preparation companies. We can train kids on how to manage checking and savings accounts, but we can also ban or drastically limit overdraft or ATM fees. We can teach young people the importance of early retirement, but we can also create safer, more generous retirement options that keep Americans out of poverty.

If I’m bored, the next time I get in my Lyft, I’ll mention education policy, as always. But I will tell the driver to oppose the financial literacy ballot initiative and leave educational policymaking to policymakers. Or maybe I’ll do what my husband does when he doesn’t want to talk to his drivers and just tell them I do HVAC repair while I put on my headphones.

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