MANAGING YOUR MONEY.

During my working years, I helped the local common schools introduce economics into their curricula.  You might remember this, and these.  Some kids might be able to manage credit, despite the "vocational" aspersion some school leaders have cast at personal finance.  "Investors of the future are going to be better able to spot the traps in the more complicated financial instruments, including adjustable rate mortgages and credit card cash advances, if they understand checking and passbook accounts first."

In Wisconsin, that sort of personal finance is now part of the high school curriculum.

For two decades, Kerri Herrild has wanted Wisconsin students to learn about personal finance. It's a social justice issue, she said.

Starting with the class of 2028, every high schooler will have to take a personal finance course in order to graduate after Gov. Tony Evers signed the requirement into law in December.

Most teenagers don't know how credit card debt works or how to start investing in the stock market, but it's something they can easily learn in school. Herrild has been teaching an elective personal finance course at De Pere High School for 18 years.

The course covers topics ranging from paying for college to banking, and throughout the semester, Herrild sees students have those "ah-ha" light-bulb moments.

"One that just sticks out in my mind that I really remember — it was from spring last year — a girl had been in class for three days," she said. "And after three days, she came up and she's like, 'Can I just tell you that I have learned more useful knowledge in three days than I think I did in like a year and a half of math.'"

Kids are excited to learn about finances, Herrild said, because everyone at some point has to deal with money.

Yes, there is a lot of rent-seeking involved in the drafting of curricula, and yes, the rent-seekers will include the banking sector, and yes, whenever I worked with representatives of the banking sector in programming, I spent a lot of time on transaction costs, which, for low-net worth individuals, often make working through the few-questions-asked poverty industry seem preferable.

"If I grow up only seeing my family not trust banks and rely on payday lenders ... if that's all that I ever see and all that I ever know, then that's what I'm going to continue doing," Herrild said. "When you are given the chance to know better, you have the chance to do better."

"I just feel so strongly that this is such a social justice issue, and kids deserve this," she continued.

If the kids become financially savvy enough to work through the knock-on effects of means-tested filing fees, so much the better.  Let's leave aside the cavil that sixty years of deconstructing bourgeois norms and waging wars on poverty have left generations without the cultural and social capital that bring us to this pass.

For most of her teaching career, Herrild has worked to make that a reality. She wasn't successful in getting a requirement implemented locally at her district, so she teamed up with Next Gen Personal Finance. The organization has a goal of getting every state to require a personal finance course by 2030.

In 2022, Herrild headed to the state capitol in Madison with other educators from across the state to testify in support of such a requirement — something she never thought she'd do.

Despite having prepared written testimony, Herrild threw it aside and improvised her whole speech in front of the Assembly Committee on Education back in 2022.

"We, as Wisconsin, need this. We can't afford to have citizens who carry that much debt, and this is for the good of all of us," she recalled saying.

Several of the representatives on the committee said they'd come into the hearing opposed to requiring a personal finance course, Herrild said. But then they said her testimony and that of other educators and students changed their minds.

It took two tries to get the mandate passed.  Yes, I continue to have my doubts about state mandates governing curriculum, anodyne or otherwise, and I have no doubt that there are people in Wisconsin and elsewhere who will complain about personal finance classes fostering benign views of capitalism, particularly with the Federal Reserve and assorted banks being involved with economic education.  And yet, there used to be champions of economic education in Wisconsin who would be able to work with school districts wondering "How are we going to comply with the latest unfunded mandate?"