My students at Union Square Academy for Health Sciences in New York City are eager to participate in Budget Challenge during the second semester of the school year when our class transitions out of Participation in Government into Economics. Students are vocal about their desire to learn about personal finance and develop financial literacy skills. Although it's a common practice for Government and Economics to be taught as stand alone courses, independent from one another, it is vital for educators to develop unique ways to foster connections between personal finance, political science and civic engagement.
Since 2020, there has been a renewed emphasis on civics in schools across America, as well as a push to include personal finance in core curriculum. This makes a lot of sense, civic engagement and financial literacy are both vital to being a contributing member of society, and are inherently interconnected in purpose and pedagogy. Practicing responsible financial habits and filing a tax return are meaningful civic responsibilities, similar to voting, serving on a jury and knowing your elected representatives in various levels and branches of government. Both civic engagement and personal finance emphasize learning by doing and have the ability to extend learning beyond the classroom. As such, it is important for educators to find unique ways to overlap and interweave these educational initiatives.
When students in my Participation in Government and AP US Government & Politics classes transition to more economically aligned units of study during second semester, they start off by analyzing a pay stub to learn about how they personally contribute to government revenue and expenditure associated with fiscal policy. Over Civics Week, during the second week of March, students learn how to prepare and file a tax return. My students can utilize their financial documents from Budget Challenge for this task or their own W2 if they earned income from a part time job or a paid internship that is coordinated for students during their junior or senior as part of their career and technical education.
Grant writing is another meaningful project based learning endeavor that connects to budgeting and hones students' argumentative writing skills while extending students’ learning beyond the classroom. The process of writing a grant requires one to think strategically about money, determine community goals, and action plan for the future and most importantly, has potential for real world impact. My students' participation in Budget Challenge will be funded through a NEA Envision Equity Grant that I wrote and applied for over the summer of 2024 entitled Graduate with Financial $kills. Unlike most grants that often target non profit organizations, these NEA grants are specifically designed with teachers and schools in mind. I encourage all teachers to seek out and apply to grants as a meaningful expression of teacher leadership that elevates educators as multifaceted professionals that not only facilitate meaningful learning experience, but proactively seek out the funding sources necessary to extend learning beyond the classroom. Better yet, have your students identify and draft a grant proposal or cowrite a grant application together.
When I studied Economics in high school and college, my classes focused on theory and policy. Those lessons did not prepare me for adulthood or real life challenges such as purchasing insurance, filing a tax return or making sound investment decisions. The shortcomings of my own financial education within schools shaped my desire to provide my students with a hands-on approach to learning about spending, saving, and investing money responsibly that also fosters their civic readiness. As states begin to formalize civic engagement mandates, educational administrators need to develop ways to ensure financial literacy is included as a measure of civic readiness. Students in New York can earn a state seal of civic readiness on their high school diplomas for project work that includes developing action civics projects, participatory budgeting proposals, speech writing related to community issues, even completing a work based internship, yet preparing a tax return, creating an emergency fund or a diversified investment portfolio are not recognized as accredited tasks towards earning the graduation seal. The skill associated with borrowing and saving responsibly and their macroeconomic effects on our country warrant bundling personal finance into various civic education mandates.
You can learn more about David, his teaching and see examples of his students’ civic engagement and financial literacy at his website: www.cagebustingclassrooms.com.