Florida lawmakers are considering making a financial literacy course a requirement for high school graduation, as more states seek to improve youths’ understanding of how to manage their personal finances.
A bill that would require a person to earn a high school diploma before he or she could receive a driver’s license. What is your position on this issue? Write a letter to convince your state legislature to accept your point of view.
Writing Prompt: Your state legislature is considering a bill that would require a person to earn a high school diploma before he or she could receive a driver’s license. What is your position on this issue?
Write a letter to convince your state legislature to accept your point of view.
While the format of the body is still the basic five paragraph essay, this assignment is also a formal business letter.
The only other difference is that limited use of first and second person pronouns is allowed.
Find the name and contact information for your state legislative representative online.
Plagiarism Warning: All essays are submitted to a variety of plagiarism software programs to check for copied material. Copying parts or all of other people’s written work and passing it off as yours is a violation of the school’s Academic Integrity Policy, which could lead to expulsion.
Florida lawmakers are considering making a financial literacy course a requirement for high school graduation, as more states seek to improve youths’ understanding of how to manage their personal finances.
A bipartisan bill winding its way through the state House of Representatives would require high school students to earn a half credit in personal financial literacy and money management. If passed, the bill would take effect starting with students entering the ninth grade in the 2022-23 school year, and make Florida the sixth state to require taking a stand-alone course in financial literacy for graduation.
The class would cover checkbook balancing, completing loan applications, inheritance, insurance, computing federal income tax and “contesting an incorrect billing statement,” among other topics. The draft legislation seeks to “better prepare young people in this state for adulthood by providing them with the requisite knowledge to achieve financial stability.”
Another version of the bipartisan bill is undergoing vetting in the Florida Senate.
The bill — along with similar education laws passed in other states, such as Virginia — aims to tackle a national problem: Many Americans suffer from financial illiteracy. Gaps in financial literacy levels along socio-demographic lines are also much wider in the United States than other developed countries, according to a recent report by the Milken Institute.
“The financial literacy gap between men and women in the US is about 37 percent wider than the [38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] average and about 59 percent wider than the world average,” the authors of a 2021 report published by the think tank wrote. “Inequality in financial literacy among adults is relatively high in the US,” they said, even when compared with emerging economies.
The problem is marked among youths, according to the Council for Economic Education, a New York-based nonprofit whose mission is “to equip K-12 students with the tools and knowledge of personal finance and economics so that they can make better decisions.”
One in six students don’t “reach the baseline level of proficiency in financial literacy,” according to the group.
Even one in four millennials — an age group well into adulthood — spends more than they earn. About two-thirds of that generation “have less than 3 months worth of emergency funds,” the council says.
Florida’s draft bill passed the state House’s PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee and the Secondary Education & Career Development Subcommittee this month. It will be seen by the Education & Employment Committee on Wednesday, and needs backing on the floors of the House and Senate.