PERSONAL FINANCE EDUCATION FOR PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

  

 

A new report projects that in five years, 29 states will guarantee personal finance education for every graduating public high school student. Less than two decades ago, just three states offered a guarantee. The 2026 National Report Card on State Efforts to Improve Financial Literacy in High SchoolsTM , issued by the National Endowment for Financial Education® (NEFE®), projects that by 2031, 73% of public high school students will live in a state where a semester-long course in personal finance will be guaranteed to every graduating student.

 

The 2026 report card shows that 10 states have already earned an A grade, and 19 are projected to earn an A grade by 2031. The percentage of states receiving C, D and F grades dropped from 40% to 14% in this year’s report card. By 2031, just two states are expected to have an F grade on the report card.

 

NEFE is issuing this sixth report card, which reflects how well personal finance is taught in high schools. The previous five report cards were issued by the Center for Financial Literacy (CFL) at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. The first report was issued in 2013. Beginning with this latest edition, NEFE assumes responsibility for the report card, expanding its reach and influence as a leading measure of state-level financial education policy for years to come.

 

“The National Endowment for Financial Education is committed to ensuring access to effective financial education for all Americans, and research tells us requiring foundational personal finance instruction in high school is among the most impactful ways to do so,” says Billy Hensley, Ph.D., president and CEO of NEFE. “The progress across our field is encouraging, but the work ahead requires continued collaboration, evidence building and investment in the systems that support learners and educators. The report card is one of the most compelling tools available to build and sustain momentum across states to adopt and effectively implement these critical programs.”

 

John Pelletier, senior fellow at NEFE, projects that when the Class of 2031 graduates, 29 states will require high school students to take a standalone personal finance course, with an estimated 73% of public high school students who graduate in 2031 taking a substantive personal finance course prior to graduation. When the first report card was issued in 2013, only three states earned an A grade, representing just 5% of students in the nation’s public schools.

 

“Financial literacy is linked to positive outcomes like wealth accumulation, stock market participation, effective retirement planning and avoiding high-cost alternative financial services. Conversely, poor financial literacy and negative financial behaviors often go hand in hand,” says Pelletier. “High school personal finance education can help alleviate the cycle of poverty that exists in our nation. Requiring all students to take a standalone financial literacy course, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status, is an important step our nation can take toward reducing inequality.”

 

A 2025 nationwide opinion poll from NEFE found that 83% of U.S. adults believe the state they live in should require a semester- or year-long course focused on personal finance as a graduation requirement, while 82% of respondents who attended high school say they wish they were required to complete a personal finance class while they were in school.

 

“NEFE’s data reflect strong public support for financial education in high school. The vast majority of Americans agree their state should require a semester- or year-long course for graduation, and that personal finance is equally as important as core subjects like math, science and English. Furthermore, most Americans believe the quality of their financial life would be better had they received financial education in school,” Hensley adds.

 

As momentum for personal finance education grows, teacher training will become more important. The CFL projects that 37,000 highly trained personal finance educators in just the grade A and B states will be needed by 2031. To produce the report card, NEFE conducted detailed reviews of high school graduation requirements, state academic standards for personal finance education, and laws, regulations and guidelines related to how each state delivers personal finance education in its public high schools. A national map with information on the 50 states and the District of Columbia and a downloadable copy of the full report card is available here.

How States and Districts Carry Out Career and Technical Education Under Perkins V

IES has released a new evaluation report, National Evaluation of Career and Technical Education Under Perkins V, that provides a nationwide descriptive picture of how states and districts implemented the law’s priorities during the 2022–23 school year. Perkins V introduced changes designed to expand access to and participation in career and technical education for all students, enhance Career and Technical Education (CTE) program quality through new mechanisms for program improvement and labor market alignment, and increase flexibility in Perkins funding and accountability. The report examines how states and districts sought to carry out these priorities, including common barriers and variation in implementation. The evaluation draws on surveys of state CTE directors and a nationally representative sample of Perkins-funded districts and independent area CTE schools. Findings include: Most states and districts sponsored activities to expand CTE access and participation, but these efforts were typically not among their highest priorities for CTE. States and districts widely implemented Perkins V mechanisms to improve CTE program quality and strengthen alignment with labor market needs, but Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment requirements sometimes limited district implementation. Most states used funding flexibilities to support local priorities, but fewer used accountability flexibilities, such as adopting multiple program quality indicators. To access the report, please visit: https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/evaluation-report/national-evaluation-career-and-technical-education-under-perkins-v.

Young adults using the AI for health issues more likely to have anxiety and depression

 Young adults who use generative artificial intelligence to ask health-related questions are more likely to screen positive for clinically significant anxiety and depression than those not using the AI tool for health issues, according to a new study led by University of Florida researcher Yusen Zhai. 

The study, one of the first large U.S. studies to examine the relationship between generative AI use and mental health, analyzed data from nearly 100,000 young adults. Researchers found that the odds of screening positive for clinically significant anxiety and depression were 52% and 46% greater for people who reported using generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude for health-related questions.

The findings show an association between the two behaviors. They do not establish that using generative AI causes anxiety or depression, or that people with anxiety or depression are necessarily more likely to use AI for health questions.

Zhai, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UF College of Education, said he was intrigued by the findings because concerns about AI in education often center on how the students use it for assignments and productivity. His research focuses on AI, mental health and the ways technology can be used to identify and address mental health risks.

“We are learning that young people are turning to AI, especially generative AI systems, when they feel worried or vulnerable or are trying to understand their health symptoms,” he said. “We need to understand if there are underlying issues or associations, which is what the current study begins to address.”

Among people in the study who used generative AI for health-related questions, about 52% screened positive for anxiety, compared with about 43% among those who did not use AI for health questions. For depression, the figures were about 47% and 38%, respectively.

The association remained after researchers accounted for factors including age, race and ethnicity, biological sex and socioeconomic status.

Zhai said the results raise questions about what happens when people repeatedly turn to AI while they are worried about their health.

One possible pattern begins with uncertainty about symptoms. A person asks for reassurance from an AI system, receives an answer and then develops additional questions or uncertainties. That can lead to another question, followed by another answer and potentially another round of questioning.

“That kind of repeated cycle could reinforce rumination, health anxiety or other distress,” Zhai said.

The conversational nature of generative AI makes that cycle different from a traditional internet search, he said. A search engine generally provides links to information, while generative AI can synthesize information and respond directly to follow-up questions.

That interaction can feel persuasive because AI responses are often conversational and confident, even when the information is incomplete, inaccurate or misleading.

“The scary part to me is that young people may have difficulty identifying an incorrect piece of information when it is blended into an otherwise plausible response,” Zhai said.

The study is based on data collected from 2023 to 2024, relatively early in the widespread adoption of generative AI. These AI chatbots had only become more broadly available when the survey was conducted, Zhai said. As use of generative AI has expanded since then, the behavior may have become more common.

That makes the findings an early indication rather than a complete picture of how young people use AI for health information today, he said.

The direction of the relationship also requires future investigations. Young people experiencing anxiety or depression may be more likely to turn to AI as a first step in seeking information or support. At the same time, repeatedly seeking reassurance from AI could potentially reinforce worry for some users.

“It’s hard to say AI is bad or wrong,” Zhai said. “AI could be a way for students to seek help.”

He said the more important question is how people use the technology, and he recommends that young people pay attention to how they feel after using generative AI for health questions.

“If an interaction leaves someone feeling more informed and able to take a constructive next step,” Zhai said, “that may be different from an interaction that prompts a desire to repeatedly ask the same questions — and that awareness is part of developing AI literacy.”

Mental health professionals also may need to ask clients how they are using generative AI and help them evaluate information they receive from it, Zhai said.

Universities could incorporate similar guidance into broader AI literacy efforts, including helping students identify trustworthy health information and understand the limitations of AI-generated answers.

“The problem is not generative AI itself,” Zhai said. “It’s the ‘how’ question — how people use it.”

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Journal

Journal of Counseling & Development

DOI

10.1002/jcad.70064

Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light

 Teachers are increasingly turning from print textbooks to online materials to teach their courses. But when tasked with finding information online, they can encounter questionable or unreliable material. 

New research from the University of Kansas has found that some of the most used online resources for social studies education overwhelmingly present the topic of imperialism in a positive light and use a “balance sheet” approach that can ask inappropriate questions of young students.

Anna Yonas, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching, and Stephen Jackson, associate professor of educational leadership & policy studies, study how difficult topics in social studies are taught and how history standards are set. The KU researchers wanted to understand how imperialism is presented in online, open educational resources, known as OERs.

“Teachers are increasingly using textbooks because they’re really expensive, and many school districts can’t access them. So, teachers in many schools are turning instead to things they can find online. Sometimes that is because the school has approved a specific online curriculum. Sometimes it is because teachers are going to Google and seeing what’s out there. Sometimes they’re going to paid websites, which have their own pitfalls and problems,” Yonas said. “Imagine you are a high school teacher, you are planning three or four different courses, but you know you have to teach about imperialism in your next unit in one of your courses, so you hop on Google so that you can quickly find some preexisting resources. You don’t necessarily have the time to dig into those materials. You might be trusting when you see a name like PBS or C3 Teachers that it is high quality. So, we wanted to dig in and see what is actually happening in these materials that teachers are using and teachers might not have the time to do additional vetting on.”

For the study, Yonas and Jackson analyzed 46 sets of commonly used OERs for middle and high school social studies classes. They wanted to know whose perspectives were included in instructional materials about imperialism and how pervasive a “balance sheet” approach, in which students are asked weigh the pros and cons of such actions, were. 

“OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, with 85.7% of primary sources recorded by colonizers with few sources recorded by colonized peoples,” according to the study. The authors wrote that OERs frequently privilege Eurocentric narratives and minimize colonial voices, thus normalizing imperial conquest and perpetuating systemic silences.

The study was published in the journal Social Studies Research and Practice.

In addition to seeing how common approving presentations of imperialism were, Yonas and Jackson studied how common balance sheet approaches were. Not all OERs included a balance sheet approach, and the approach varied by platform. 

The study analyzed four platforms: OER Project, PBS, DIG and C3 Teachers. No DIG resources used such an approach, while OER and PBS used them relatively infrequently, and each of the C3 Teachers resources included them.

Such balance sheet approaches included questions for teachers to ask of their students such as “should Hawai’i be sovereign,” “was American expansion abroad justified” or asking students to perform a cost-benefit analysis of French occupation of Vietnam. There are several problems with such an approach, the authors said, namely that asking young students to debate whether people have a right to exist freely or to justify colonizing another nation is inappropriate. Further, it is academically inappropriate, as historians do not engage in such questions. 

It also reduces history to hypotheticals, as it is not possible to determine how life would be if imperialism had not happened, the authors said.

“Most recent scholarship is extremely critical of this for a lot of reasons. It often brings in sort of inappropriate questions of sovereignty and human rights and pretends as if these are questions that are appropriate matters for high schoolers to be debating,” Jackson said. “Should people be allowed to be conquered? Which invites a lot of moralizing and a lot of not very deep or complex thought, and it puts things on the table, including human rights and self-determination, as basically the subject of debate, which is pretty fraught, to say the least.”

Not all examined resources took a balance sheet approach or strictly presented the perspective of colonizers.

“One of the findings from our study is that the OER Project is doing a pretty good job of providing lessons that include sources from a range of perspectives and of asking questions that are appropriate for students to engage in, like ‘how did colonized peoples resist?’” Yonas said. “We think the more that we can elevate those materials that are doing things well, we can see more teachers using them. But we can also expand that into the pre-service teacher preparation phase, how we teach teachers to identify the shortcomings in different sets of materials.”

The study helps build understanding of OERs, as little research has been conducted on the content, their sources and quality of the educational materials. Yonas, who has studied how states mandate teaching difficult topics like genocide and how young teachers approach such topics, said better understanding the materials can help schools, teachers and students ultimately have access to high-quality, reliable educational materials that address difficult topics.

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Journal

Social Studies Research and Practice

DOI

10.1108/SSRP-03-2026-0037

90% of incarcerated youth suffered prior abuse

 

Nearly every incarcerated male youth in a new University of Michigan study experienced some form of prior physical abuse.

 

Nine in 10 were exposed to at least mild physical abuse, one-third suffered severe prior sexual abuse, and two-thirds reported adverse childhood experiences, according to U-M researchers, who looked at incarcerated adolescents ages 13-20 at a single all-male juvenile detention facility in Michigan.

 

"What really stuck out to me most was the sexual abuse rate, that 70% of them had at least some exposure to sexual abuse," said Suzanne Perkins, research assistant professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "I've worked with a lot of kids, so very few things upset me in the work that I do. But when I saw that statistic, I just burst into tears. I couldn't believe that it was such a high statistic."

 

According to the study, published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, 85% of the teenagers had a learning disability, a mental health condition or both. More than 75% showed signs of a learning or cognitive disability during direct testing.

 

The findings also showed that more than 60% had a disability listed in their official records before the study. In addition, 80% met the criteria for multiple diagnoses and 25% qualified for five or more diagnoses.

 

"Children with genetic disorders or disabilities are much more likely to be targeted for violence and sexual abuse," Perkins said. "At the same time, violence causes cognitive problems through brain injury mechanisms. The relationship is bidirectional."

 

Perkins and colleagues reviewed medical and educational records, surveyed participants about their experiences with violence and trauma, and also conducted individual cognitive and educational testing.

 

According to the researchers, the relationship between disability and violence can work in both directions. Young people with disabilities may be more vulnerable to abuse, while violence and trauma can contribute to cognitive problems.

 

The study also highlights the importance of identifying learning and cognitive problems early.

 

"Schooling is really central," Perkins said. "Young people who have missed school or struggled academically may need interventions for reading, attention, organization and planning."

 

The study suggests that support should address the broader circumstances surrounding young people's lives, including housing, food, healthcare and dental care.

 

"It's a multipronged problem that really requires social work and schools and counseling, and not just policing," Perkins said.

 

Hidden cognitive needs

 

The study also included cognitive experiments testing inhibition and other executive functions—direct testing that Perkins said is less common in research on incarcerated youth, which tends to rely on medical and educational records.

 

The findings suggest that understanding these kids' learning and cognitive needs could help schools and service providers identify problems before they become harder to treat.

 

"If you want to stop this from being an ongoing problem, you really need to start with early intervention," Perkins said.

 

Study: The Comorbidity of Violence Exposure, Mental Health, Cognitive Functioning, and Disabilities in Incarcerated Youth (DOI: 10.1007/s40653-026-00960-w)

Intentional substance exposures at school among elementary- and middle-school-aged children

 A new study found that rates of intentional substance exposures at school reported to U.S. poison centers increased substantially among elementary- and middle-school-aged children from 2000 through 2024, while high-school-aged adolescents continued to experience the highest rates of serious medical outcomes and hospital admissions. Researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Central Ohio Poison Center analyzed calls to U.S. poison centers and found that the overall rate of reported intentional substance exposures at school increased 77.5% from 2000 to 2024.

In a study published in American Journal of Emergency Medicine, researchers found the increase was 287% among elementary-school-aged children (from 3.1 to 11.9 reports per 100,000 children) and 112% among middle-school-aged children (from 10 to 21.3 per 100,000 children). In contrast, the rate among high-school-aged children decreased by 4% over the study period.

“One of the most striking findings was how the age pattern changed over time,” said Hannah Hays, MD, co-author of the study and medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center. “By about 2015, the reported exposure rate among middle-school-aged children had surpassed that among high-school-aged youth. At the same time, high-school-aged adolescents continued to experience the most serious medical outcomes. These findings tell us that prevention needs to begin earlier, while older adolescents also need ready access to clinical and mental health support.”

Overall, high-school-aged teenagers accounted for almost half (46%) of intentional substance exposures at school. The higher rates of serious medical outcomes and hospital admissions in this age group are partially explained by their higher rates of substance abuse and suspected self-harm or suicidal intent.

Leading substance categories differed by age group as well.

• Elementary school (6–10 years): cosmetics/personal care products (15%), arts/crafts/office supplies (15%), plants (15%), and foreign bodies/toys/miscellaneous (14%).
• Middle school (11–13 years): cosmetics/personal care products (13%), arts/crafts/office supplies (11%), foreign bodies/toys/miscellaneous (8%), and analgesics (8%).
• High school (14–18 years): analgesics (15%), stimulants and street drugs (12%), sedative/hypnotic/antipsychotic medications (10%), and cough and cold preparations (9%).

More than half of the intentional exposures occurring at school were attributable to intentional misuse (62%), followed by abuse (24%) and suspected self-harm or suicidal intent (14%). Substance abuse was more than four-and-a-half times more likely to be associated with a serious medical outcome than non-abuse-related intentional exposures. Likewise, suspected self-harm or suicidal intent-related exposures were more than two times more likely to be associated with a serious medical outcome than exposures not related to suspected self-harm or suicidal intent. In poison center data, “intentional misuse” refers to improper use for a reason other than seeking a high or other psychotropic effect; recreational use with the intent of seeking a high or other psychotropic effect is categorized separately as “abuse.”

Pharmaceutical exposures in the high school group were associated with substantially greater clinical severity. Across all age groups, exposures involving pharmaceuticals were about 10 times more likely to result in a serious medical outcome and 14 times more likely to result in admission to a non-critical or critical care unit than non-pharmaceutical substance exposures.

This study highlights the need for age-specific prevention interventions and clinical response strategies – safe storage not only in the home, but in school settings as well. Prevention efforts that begin in early childhood and availability of intensive clinical and mental health resources for older adolescents, who continue to experience the greatest morbidity, are crucial.

“The increasing rate of reported intentional substance exposures at school among elementary school- and middle school-aged children, combined with the greater severity observed among high school-aged children, underscores the need for targeted and coordinated prevention and early identification strategies that integrate substance use education and mental health screening and intervention,” said Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “Collaboration among school officials and educators, clinicians, poison centers, and public health professionals is important for reducing intentional substance exposures in schools, especially those associated with suspected self-harm and suicidal intent and substance abuse.” 

Examining emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature

 Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, this study examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. 

A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions described in text on the same page. Nearly half of pages show zero overlap between the emotions described in text and those shown in images. This pattern persists across time, contexts, and identities. 

Household purchases and library inventories suggest content may be endogenously shaped by consumer demand favoring “positive” cover imagery, implying market forces narrow the emotional landscape children encounter.