Opinion: Raising the alarm about students’ lack of financial empowerment

By SHEILA MILLER

Published: 10-21-2023 5:00 PM

Sheila Miller is a business education teacher at Newfound Regional High School in Bristol.

As a high school educator entrusted with teaching students about personal finance, I have a message: we’re not doing enough to prepare our youth for their financial futures.

The need to teach financial empowerment in every K-12 classroom nationwide is the driving force behind my joining over 50 teachers in 33 states nationwide in signing up to participate in the nonprofit Jump$tart Coalition’s Teen Teach-in this October. We are bringing together high school students, elementary students, teachers and parents to raise awareness about the serious knowledge gap that endangers this generation’s future.

Generation Z, which includes all high school students across America, has the lowest level of financial literacy among the five generations of American adults, according to the TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index. Only 24% of Gen Z respondents could correctly answer four out of five basic financial literacy questions, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). And The New York Times recently reported that Gen Z is “struggling to keep up their credit scores and paying an increasing amount of disposable income servicing their debts.”

Jump$tart’s National Teen Teach-in is helping us fight back, one classroom at a time. This unique peer-to-peer teaching opportunity helps cement my students’ personal finance skills by allowing them to take the personal finance lessons I’ve taught them and turn them into financial empowerment lessons for their younger peers. For elementary school students, this is a chance to learn the basics of saving, spending, and budgeting from “the big kids.”

But foremost, the Teen Teach-in is an opportunity for us to collectively alert our communities that our children are not receiving the effective financial empowerment they need to navigate our increasingly complex financial landscape and urge them to take action.

My hope is that these lessons will spark conversations with parents, administrators, and the public about the need to bring personal finance concepts into the classroom, for all kids at all grade levels. Financial education is truly a topic that everyone needs to understand in order to thrive as an adult, and there is no better place to level the playing field for the next generation than in our community schools.

The Teen Teach-in is not meant as a substitute for substantive, standards-based financial education in the classroom. Rather, it’s intended as a beginning: for students to learn about financial concepts in new ways, for parents to recognize the need to advocate for financial empowerment for their children, and for all of us to start walking the talk on financial education.

It is truly transformational to see how learning about personal finance can change lives. I see it every day in my classroom, and I hope our community can come together to help pave the way for a more financially empowered, just society for our nation’s youth.