I’ve been teaching middle school for three years and college for six. While differences exist between the two levels, commonalities are present. Students in junior high and juniors in college often ask a similar question: “Why aren’t we taught about money in school?”
It should be noted that I don’t teach in a business- or finance-related program of study. Still, money is ingrained in so much of our lives that financial literacy should be embedded throughout our education system, regardless of age or career path.
In 2023, the state of Wisconsin—where I live and teach—signed WI Act 60 into law in an effort to ensure that every high school teaches financial literacy, in the form of a half-credit course totaling one semester. This is a solid and promising start, although implementation, naturally, remains to be seen.
The K–8 sector is presently a different story. Despite legislation and state standards involving personal financial literacy, money education is often not incorporated into curriculum. While it is difficult to pinpoint the reasons for this, I believe some schools don’t think there is time in the day to include financial literacy. Others may not consider it to be “academic” in nature, while many may simply be doing “business as usual” in regard to curriculum, which has historically not included financial literacy.
How It Started
What have I done about this? Well, having spent time studying finance myself, I decided to found a youth financial literacy services company in Milwaukee called Investment Scholars. Through its weekly after-school classes, K–8 students earn “income” in the form of gift cards as they learn about money. The program focuses primarily on one important element that’s often left out of conversations around financial literacy: the science of investing.
Stocks play a key role in the lessons, since investing in publicly traded companies is one of the most accessible avenues for youth to get started. Students are taught about what it means to own shares of a company, as well as ways to monetize stocks. The discussion of market share is always an engaging topic, as we talk about which publicly traded companies take up the most shelf space in a given grocery store aisle. For example, Coke dominates the soda section, while Pepsi is in charge of the chips area (since they own Frito-Lay).
Real estate, entrepreneurship, and credit are among other covered topics, and special attention is also given to debt—its risk, realities, and how to manage it responsibly.
How It’s Going
Students are incredibly insightful when it comes to money. One of my favorite aspects of running this program is hearing young people’s takes on how money and economics work. Some students, for instance have decided that they want to first start investing in the stock market, versus real estate, because they think they can better mitigate risk by managing a stock portfolio. Whereas others are already planning to purchase a multi-family home as their first property as a way to offset costs and begin real estate investing.
Since the inception of Investment Scholars in 2023, students have achieved excellent outcomes. The first middle school cohort averaged 10% return on investment in their mock stock portfolios, over 5 months. This beat the market.
While the 2023–2024 program focused on middle-school students, the next year it expanded to include a cohort of 2nd through 5th graders. Even partners of the program wondered whether these grades were too young to learn about investing. But despite the initial apprehension, I was given the go ahead and soon enough, primary students were drawing their “First Investment Property” and pitching business ideas to one another à la Shark Tank.
Many of the businesses they came up with were retail-oriented or customer-facing. Seeing this, the students decided to group some of their businesses into one, such as a coffee shop featuring merchandise like clothing that could be upsold and enhance the consumer experience. They then planned to pitch an ultimate idea of a shopping plaza to imaginary developers and investors, with their businesses being preloaded and primed to operate in the plaza suites.
What the Kids Say
Students have a wide range of feedback about the program, as different things resonate with them. Some are excited about entrepreneurship, while others find data such as stock analytics to be intriguing. One parent commented on how her children came home one day talking about stocks. She told me, “You know, I’ve been wanting to get back into stocks, and since they brought it up, I’m going to!”
Understanding that they can start purchasing stocks at their age (with parental permission and after adequate research, of course) is a major piece of power for students. One child came into a session and told me that she and her parents bought Amazon stocks together after we discussed it the week prior. Some students have been eager to use birthday money to start investing.
I think if every student realizes that they can own companies at a young age, this can change their world view. Understanding the different aspects of money, including its risks, will translate into financial success and freedom later on in life. For these reasons, I believe it is vital for some form of investment education, along with the other elements of financial literacy, to exist in every school. In every classroom.
More on “Why”
I tell my middle schoolers, “Math is sometimes money, but money is always math.” Math curriculum needs money lessons, and that isn’t always the case in our schools. So much of the world around us involves money and I’d argue that if we are to help prepare students for the next phases of their lives, money should be a component of every course.
Helping kids prepare for financial decisions they’ll need to make outside of school is crucial. As such, it’s important that we as educators ask ourselves the following questions: What are we currently doing to teach students about money? Are our classrooms—or our schools—financially literate? What can we do to improve in this regard? I’m no Oracle of Omaha, but as your friendly money mentor from Milwaukee, I think these questions are worth asking—and answering.