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Landmark faculty member, Danielle Phillips teaches math at our high school and educates her student on personal finance, among other topics. She has become passionate about personal finance being taught to all high school students in Massachusetts. Below is a Q&A with Danielle about how she's helping bring this topic to the Masses.

 

I learned about this topic from an organization called K-16 Advocacy. Organization co-chairs, George (Scott) Guild and Dave Floreen, have been working for several years to get personal finance accepted as part of Massachusetts state curriculum standards. George currently teaches at Bridgewater State University. Dave is very involved with Credit for Life. I got interested in this topic through Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF) and its Mission 2030 initiative. There are currently 23 states making financial education part of their public school curriculum. Massachusetts needs to be one of them. 

  

By addressing our state's elected officials, I'm proposing that every student in Massachusetts be required to take a semester-long personal finance course as a graduation requirement. The state has standards embedded in the social science curriculum that are optional and are not tracked, which isn't good enough. 

 

I use NGPF to teach personal finance in my Integrated Math Class. The bill that is coming up discusses all the related topics that should be taught including everything from understanding a bank account, how to build credit to managing debt, and so much more. 

 

The outcome that we are most interested in is for our state legislature to adopt this bill so that all students in Massachusetts will be required to take a full semester course in personal finance to better understand the importance of financial security and what's involved in achieving that.