Financial Literacy – It’s hard to teach if kids don’t understand math

A new article in Kentucky Forward talks about “Pew Trusts: It’s hard to manage your credit when you’ve never been taught about ‘interest.’”

The article mentions a new Kentucky law that will finally require our schools to teach students something about credit and finances – beginning in 2020 – but that comes awfully slowly since the Bluegrass State is reported to rank high for financial illiteracy and ranks equally high for the number of citizens who go into bankruptcy due to poor fiscal management.

But, there is a bigger catch in this plan. It’s hard to teach kids about interest when they don’t know much about math to begin with. According to the NAEP Data Explorer, in 2017 only 32 percent of Kentucky’s white students were proficient or above in math and for the state’s black students, the proficiency rate was only a grim nine percent. We need to deal with those major math deficiencies if our kids are ever to understand what they need to know to be financially literate.