For sure, many Maryland kids get the basics in economics or social studies classes. Carroll County and a couple of other districts teach separate personal-finance classes. But there is no standard to ensure that high school graduates can understand the credit-card hustles they'll get the minute they accept their diplomas.
Two years ago, the General Assembly created a task force to upgrade financial literacy in public schools, starting in kindergarten. Pros have been working on material and will soon show it to the state Board of Education.
It looks like a good start. They're focusing on entrepreneurship, saving, investing and credit management. They should emphasize the ability of compound interest to enrich or impoverish people over time. If it were up to me, they would basically order kids never to carry a credit-card balance.
Whatever the content, the key is making city and county systems teach the stuff - in a semester-long course to every high school student.
"There's always bureaucratic push-back because it's not their idea, not their initiative," says Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, who is a strong advocate of financial literacy. "If we don't order it, it probably won't get done."
Franchot wants the legislature to require personal-finance courses for high school but let each locality customize the instruction.
Gov. Martin O'Malley "would be very open to mandating a financial literacy curriculum" but wants to learn more about how it would be implemented, said spokesman Rick Abbruzzese.
Those guys are Democrats. Financial literacy is a natural for liberals. School instruction is a way to empower lower-income kids who aren't learning financial skills from their parents.
"I'm already teaching my parents what I'm learning here," a student told Franchot when he visited a class at Westminster High School.
But this is a bipartisan issue. Carroll County Republican Del. Susan W. Krebs is on the financial literacy task force.
Conservatives will never get their "ownership society" if millions lack the knowledge to become successful owners of houses, businesses or financial assets. If people were competent with money, we wouldn't need the Consumer Financial Protection Agency being proposed in Washington.
Arguments for the free markets Republicans prefer are based on the notion that people are rational, that they know what's good for them and act accordingly. That little theory got gutted by the folks who took on mortgage payments that left no room in their budgets for gas or food.
Mandatory personal-finance classes can help raise a new generation of rational Marylanders. That'll be good for them and, if it helps avoid another $2 trillion financial meltdown, everybody else, too.
