Protect beneficial personal finance course for California students | Opinion

Landmark legislation that established a required personal finance course for high school students is being threatened by a bill currently before the Legislature that should be rejected. Senate Bill 1147, authored by Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Redlands, undermines California’s financial education law, Assembly Bill 2927, that guarantees that every high school student will take a semester-long course in personal finance before graduating. With this complex economy, that’s the last thing that California needs.

Two years ago, I authored AB 2927. Guaranteeing personal finance education for all students is incredibly popular: 78% of California voters supported the policy in 2023 polling, and nearly 900,000 Californians signed a petition to put it on the ballot. But getting this law passed was not easy. It took years of work, multiple bills and dozens of meetings with teachers, school board members, business leaders, county superintendents, banks, student advocates, certified public accountants and Next Gen Personal Finance, the nonprofit that has trained more California public high school personal finance teachers than any other entity in the country.

Everyone agreed that personal finance education was a good idea. The Legislature passed AB 2927 unanimously. Every Democrat and every Republican in the Senate and Assembly voted “yes.” And on June 29, 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

What has happened since then is exactly what good policy is supposed to look like. The State Board of Education and the Instructional Quality Commission spent 18 months engaged in a public, expert-driven curriculum review and adopted California’s Personal Finance Curriculum Guide in March, two months ahead of the deadline written into the law.

California public high school teachers, on their own time, have already logged more than 11,500 hours of professional development at 474 schools. Many districts are launching personal finance classes years before they are required to. In March, Newsom stood at San Lorenzo High School and called California’s approach a national model.

But now, frustratingly, SB 1147 would undermine the years of work it took to guarantee high quality personal finance education for all California students, with courses covering all standards and recognized as a national model.

It would allow districts to replace the required stand-alone personal finance course with another option that does not meet California’s standards for personal finance education. This would lead to inconsistent quality and unequal access to quality personal finance education.

Additionally, SB 1147 would also add real costs. California’s approved curriculum guide makes free, expert-vetted personal finance curricula available to every district in California. SB 1147 will push districts toward vendor-supplied, year-long courses that charge per-student exam fees, per-teacher training fees and branded textbook costs. That is money out of district budgets that would otherwise go to teachers and classrooms.

And it is also money out of students’ pockets over a lifetime. Tyton Partners has estimated the lifetime benefit of a one-semester high school personal finance course at $127,000 per student. California graduates more than 450,000 high school students every year. That is the scale of what California’s current personal finance education law was designed to deliver, and the scale of what is at risk if state legislators waters down the stand-alone requirement.

California’s teachers are not asking for SB 1147. They are asking for the time, training and resources to teach the personal finance course we already promised their students. They have it, and they are using it. The first graduating class to benefit will walk across the stage in 2031.

When legislators attempt to change school curriculum standards, it needs to be thoughtful and carefully thought through. SB 1147 does not pass this test.

Kevin McCarty is the mayor of Sacramento. He served in the California State Assembly from 2014 to 2024 and authored AB 2927, California’s stand-alone personal finance graduation requirement.