Pensions are sort of like New Year’s resolutions. Policymakers always promise, to themselves and to their constituents, that this will be the year they’ll finally get their financial house in order and bolster their pensions. But inevitably, something shiny comes along and distracts them.  

Oklahoma is grappling with this dilemma right now. After years of dutifully funneling millions of extra dollars into its beleaguered teacher pension plan, state policymakers are now considering scaling back. Instead, they would like to use that money to fund : pay raises for active teachers, more money for its school choice tax credit program, plus new investments in reading and math.

It’s likely to be a popular list. But it threatens to derail the state’s progress on pension funding. 

Oklahoma has actually done better on the pension front than most other states. Thanks to a combination of benefit cuts, plus a surge of new contributions, it has dramatically improved the health of its teacher pension plan. 

For example, the system’s unfunded liability, essentially the difference between how much it had promised and how much it had saved toward those promises, from $10.4 billion in 2010 down to $6.1 billion last year. Its funded ratio — a comparison between its assets and its liabilities — has improved from in 2010 all the way 80% as of last June. 

Oklahoma’s teacher plan is still not quite as well-funded as the median state and local plan — which was funded last year — but the state’s policymakers deserve kudos for making progress. Current and retired Oklahoma teachers should be thankful that their retirement plan is in much better shape than it was 16 years ago.

So how did they do it? First, legislators raised the retirement age from 62 to 65 and extended the amount of time that a teacher would need to work to qualify for a benefit from five to seven years. (This is called the vesting period, and these tend to be longer for teachers than for workers in the private sector. For example, according to a survey of Vanguard 401(k) plans, of employees are immediately vested in their employer’s retirement contributions.) These policy changes meant that any Oklahoma teacher who started after Oct. 31, 2011, had to wait just a bit longer to qualify for retirement benefits than those who came before them.  

A rising stock market certainly helped the pension plan as well, but the biggest change was on the funding side. From 2001 to 2011, Oklahoma was contributing less each year than what its actuaries said it needed to. Instead of paying off their metaphorical credit card in full, they made only minimum payments, which led to a large financial hole.

But every year since 2012, Oklahoma has put in more than what its actuaries said it needed to. As of , individuals were required to contribute 7% of their salaries. Employers like school districts paid 9.5% of each employee’s salary. And the state contributed a percentage of its revenues from sales taxes, cigarette taxes, corporate income taxes, individual income taxes and lottery proceeds. This extra state contribution came out to $456 million last year, and this is the portion that state legislators now want to cut back.

Oklahoma’s teacher pension plan is in much better shape today than it was. But it’s instructive to compare it with the plan Oklahoma offers to other state employees, which is in even better shape than the teacher plan.

That largely comes down to how far legislators went in designing reforms for each plan. In the case of the teachers, Oklahoma’s legislators were more hands-off. Teachers continue to be placed in the same defined benefit pension plan, for example. On average, their benefits are worth 10.67% of their salary, according to the plan’s latest . But remember that teachers themselves are paying about two-thirds of that cost, which means that most of the contributions made by the state and its school districts are paying for the plan’s unfunded liabilities, not for benefits for today’s workers. Moreover, the benefit structure is so heavily that someone would have to teach in Oklahoma for decades just to earn more than what they personally contributed.

Meanwhile, state employees have been enrolled in a portable defined contribution 401(k)-style plan since 2015. Members are required to contribute 4.5% of their salary, their employer contributes 6% and employees qualify for a growing share of those contributions over five years. A in the state legislature would raise those contribution rates and drop the vesting requirement altogether. Oklahoma’s higher education employees get an deal.

Putting the benefit situation aside, Oklahoma deserves credit for making substantial progress funding its teacher pension plan. According to the latest financial projections, the state’s actuaries expect that the plan could be fully funded by 2034. However, that assumption depends on its investments earning a 7% return every year. They also cautioned that one risk to its projection is that “actual contributions from the state may not be made in accordance with the current arrangement.” 

If Oklahoma legislators go forward with their plans to divert some of the money toward new expenses, they’d be putting all their hard-earned funding progress at risk.  

Those classes included three players who would shape the future of District of Columbia schools: Michelle Rhee (future D.C. chancellor), Kaya Henderson (Rhee’s successor) and, perhaps most importantly, Susan Schaeffler, 55, who is retiring after 25 years as the founder of the KIPP DC Public Schools charter network.

It was Schaeffler (pronounced SHEFF-ler) who proved with her 2001 launch of KIPP KEY Academy that hiring highly motivated and skilled teachers could make academic success stories out of high-poverty children with multiple at-risk flags. Six years later, standardized math and reading tests in grades 5-8 would show KIPP students outscoring their D.C. Public School peers, particularly in eighth grade and most strongly in math.

In a few years, Rhee would choose the same strategy, pushing hard on teacher quality. And Henderson would do the same.

It was Schaeffler who showed that her one school was not a fluke. By 2006, she ran three successful middle schools with long waiting lists: Today, there are 20 KIPP schools in D.C. that educate roughly 7,300 students, of whom nearly 70% meet the at-risk definition (students with families on income or food support and those who are wards of the state, homeless or overage in high school).

In the early KIPP years, veteran education reform expert Andrew Rotherham recalls leading a tour of mostly charter skeptics when they visited one of her schools. “Susan was giving a talk on how they do things and one guy thought he was really going to dunk on her, so he said: ‘I heard you talking about performance, fundraising and management, but I haven’t heard you talking about loving children.’”

That was a mistake. 

Schaeffler paused, looked at the guy, and as Rotherham recalls, firmly responded: “Let me tell you something. The way you show you love children isn’t talking about it. It’s building effective places for them to be and that means knowing how to raise money, deploy money, manage people, all of it. Doing things really well for them is how you show children you love them.”  

Don’t be thrown off by Schaeffler’s blonde suburban look: She’s got a very sharp edge, world-beating relentlessness and a mind that doesn’t shy away from the unconventional.

Shannon Hodge, who is taking over at KIPP DC’s helm, said before she met Schaeffler she asked around about her and was told: “You’ll be in a meeting discussing something and Susan will have five ideas. Two of them will be illegal, two of them will be impossible — but the last one will be the visionary thing no one ever thought of.”

Finally, it was Schaeffler and other charter operators. working with first Rhee and then Henderson, who forged the crucial compete-but-play-nice stance in D.C. that’s missing between charter and district schools in most cities.

All the experts agree: That competitive cooperation and the unwavering focus on teacher quality on both sides are the biggest reasons why D.C., across multiple school-quality measures, from the percentage of 3- and 4-years-olds enrolled in pre-K to fourth- and eighth-grade scores on the highly watched National Assessment of Educational Progress, shot  

“Part of D.C.’s story is that it is one of the few places where the charter sector and the district came together and created a culture of putting kids first,” KIPP national co-founder Dave Levin told me last week. “Susan modeled that from the start, pushing for things that were good for D.C. as a whole.”

This strategy could have happened in other cities. But for the most part, it hasn’t.

Teachers with ‘the whatever-it-takes mindset’

That Baltimore TFA experience was wild: Rhee and Schaeffler slamming into the brutal realities of urban teaching in Baltimore. It was from that time that I got the title for my book about Rhee, , after she swatted and swallowed a bee her kids were crazily chasing around the classroom.

After Baltimore, Schaeffler gave teaching in a traditional D.C. elementary school a try, but her desire to give her students the option of staying longer than the dismissal bell to allow them to catch up ran into a stone wall. It worked for a bit, but not for long. We just don’t do that here, she was told.

“I got to the point where the system was preventing me from doing what I knew needed to happen to make sure our kids are ready for college, or ready for the next grade,” Schaeffler told me in a recent interview.

The KIPP founders in Texas heard about her, sent plane tickets to come to Houston and convinced her to start a KIPP school. Their preference, Atlanta, got rejected by Schaeffler. D.C. is home, she said, and being able to tap into the talent network she knew there was crucial.

The founders relented, and soon Schaeffler was recruiting the handful of teachers who would launch KEY Academy. “I definitely wanted to recruit teachers who had the whatever-it-takes mindset. We were going to be creating and implementing and revising all at the same time.”

Schaeffler looked to the Teach for America network and then expanded by interviewing friends of friends. ”You would say, ‘I need a teacher who can work long hours, has great classroom management and gets results.” Before hiring anyone, she observed them in the classroom.

It would appear Schaeffer recruited well. Among that first small group of hires for KIPP KEY were several who in the future would launch their own new KIPP schools. 

‘The school down the street is outperforming us’

Now entering the D.C. picture in 2007 was newly appointed Chancellor Rhee, who took note of the rising quality challenge presented by Schaeffler’s KIPP network and other charter operators and stomped the accelerator on school improvement. And by school improvement I mean teacher/principal quality.

Rhee took over a bona fide mess of a school district, one that regularly was described – — unchallenged — as the worst (and most expensive) in the nation. In my book, the chapter where I recite the dismal outcome data for D.C. students is titled, “Welcome to the Nation’s Education Superfund Site.”

The city’s corrupt mayor, Marion Barry, used the district to stash political buddies. The former teachers union president got sent to jail for embezzlement. Even simple tasks such as delivering textbooks didn’t happen. There was no curriculum. In comparison to other urban districts, D.C. lagged far behind. 

Rhee moved into her role as chancellor with a bullrush, much to the distaste of many in Washington, especially teachers who preferred the status quo. Rhee told everyone that she wanted teachers with “snap.” Teachers soon learned what that meant: a mashup of energy and effectiveness that creates classroom magic.

That didn’t always go over well.

I accompanied Rhee on many school visits, and while sitting in the back of the room watched teachers dramatically roll their eyes in protest. Many teachers appeared to see their role as more social workers than academic instructors, which probably explained the abysmal test scores.

One elementary school had this sign posted: “We’re doing the best we can with the children sent our way.”

But Rhee’s vision was made easier to explain to others by the example Schaeffler set. “In community meetings,” Schaeffler told me, “I heard Rhee say that the school down the street is outperforming us.” And “that school” was KEY Academy. 

In 2007, when Rhee arrived, 100% of KEY eighth graders scored proficient on D.C.’s standardized math test, compared to 34% of district students.

There’s another aspect to KEY’s success: When researching my book , I searched nationally for schools where boys were succeeding at the same rate as girls, and KEY turned up as one of the few where that happened. I approached Schaeffler in 2006 for permission to observe, and she gave me full access to KEY. In short, teacher quality (and a relentless push on literacy skills) explains the gender equality.

Thus began Rhee’s own full-on press for principal and teacher quality, a process that would lead to several hundred teachers getting fired along with lots of principals. Those firings, however, were accompanied by the newly designed IMPACT teacher evaluation system, a first-in-the-nation attempt to define, measure and boost teacher quality — a plan that handed out bonuses to the highest-performing teachers.

The reforms began to take hold, but Rhee’s fierceness why Adrian Fenty, the mayor who appointed her, lost reelection in 2010. The new mayor, Vincent Gray, quickly fired Rhee. 

But then something interesting happened: Not only did Gray promote Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s deputy, as the new chancellor, but IMPACT survived, despite intense teacher opposition (The American Federation of Teachers to ensure Rhee and IMPACT would disappear.)

Why did the new mayor allow Rhee’s reforms to survive? When the chancellor got fired, IMPACT was only about a year old, and thus too young to measure its effectiveness. But its potential was clear to everyone.

“My last major public event before I left DCPS was “Standing Ovation” which we held at the Kennedy Center to honor the highly effective teachers in the district,” Rhee told me in a recent interview, referring to the first group of top teachers identified by the evaluations. “Watching a bevy of teachers dressed to the nines, giddy at the recognition they were receiving, made me know what we put in place with IMPACT was working and made everything worthwhile.”

That meant that the twinned philosophies of pushing teacher quality and collaborating with the charters, pioneered by Schaeffler, became permanent fixtures in D.C. One prominent example: , launched in 2017, an application/lottery system shared by parents seeking seats in either system.

There was also the leadership training program for both charter and district teachers at Georgetown University. Schaeffler’s top example: During the pandemic, everyone on both sides held hands to figure out how to teach remotely and when to return to school.

Finally, the D.C. mayors have a great incentive to make sure the two sides work together. “We can’t have half the kids not be successful,” says Schaeffler.

Two leaders who quickly bonded

Fervent D.C. school advocates at the polar opposites hate the suggestion that D.C. charters and district schools get along. They see great injustices aimed at their side. What they miss, however, is that their quibbles pale compared to the destructive hatred between the two sectors in other cities. 

Boston has some of the highest-performing charters in the country (see Edward Brooke Charter Schools), and yet the state’s powerful teachers unions ensure that those charters can’t expand to take in more students. In Los Angeles, charter leaders and district leaders talk to one another mostly through lawyers in courtrooms. 

New York City and Newark are home to what may be the nation’s most successful charter network, Uncommon Schools, that pulls disadvantaged minority students into its classrooms, who then experience college acceptance and college graduation rates close to well-off white students.

How could any district not want to tap into that expertise?

Years ago, I sat through some small-scale Uncommon collaborations in New York and Newark, which seemed promising. But those have disappeared — no teaching collaborations in New York since 2020. 

There is no way Rhee and Schaeffler would have let that opportunity slide by.

When Rhee arrived in D.C., the two leaders bonded quickly. Rhee told me she had been on the job only a couple of days when she took an urgent call from Schaeffler: “We’re starting a summer school (in a district building) and it’s 90 degrees and we have no air conditioning!”

Rhee immediately called maintenance, sent them hustling over to the summer school site and got the AC working. The next day Schaeffler called back incredulously. “Holy crap, they came out and fixed it.”

Rhee knew KIPP ran quality schools, so she never fought against them.

 â€œI was open to giving charters our buildings,” Rhee said. “Why would we deny families of Wards 7 and 8 (D.C. ‘s highest-poverty) schools like [the ones] KIPP runs? Everyone would want to send their kids there.”

Rhee’s memories of Schaeffler? “Throughout the time she was so helpful, so supportive.”

School choice now part of D.C.’s DNA

Today, D.C., parents embrace school choice as an unquestioned right, whether it’s choosing a charter or a non-neighborhood district school. Only about a third of D.C. parents select their neighborhood school. What that means is that choice is embedded, with schools vying to outperform and, therefore, attract students. 

In the mostly white, highly affluent 3rd Ward, there are no charters and parents send their kids either to local elementary schools, where they are surrounded by other children from well-off families, or private schools. In the 7th and 8th Wards, charters are the go-to places. Where it gets interesting are the rapidly gentrifying in-between wards, where charters often get selected by well-off “progressive” families, many of whom may frown upon charters as a concept, but love having a close-by high-quality school.

Overall, s, or about 48% of all D.C. students, attend its 133 public charter schools. D.C’s gentrification may explain why district students now outperform charter students in both math and reading (45% of district students are at-risk, compared to 69% of charter students).

“Competition between sectors is healthy,” said Schaeffer. “It pushes both sectors to get better for students. Over the last two and a half decades, that dynamic has raised the bar across the city. As the city has changed, so have the needs of our students.”

KIPP and other charters are still struggling to raise scores, she said. “At the same time, the long-term outcomes tell an important story and remain strong. Year after year, our graduates enroll in and complete college at higher rates than the city … The forward momentum between the traditional and charter schools is promising and should be celebrated. Both sides are seeking the best ways to educate and prepare our students for success.”

Where next for Schaeffler?

 â€œI haven’t looked around in 25 years to see what’s out there for me. I am energized to find my next thing but my priority is a successful transition. I will be transitioning from CEO in February to a special advisor role. I will always be a cheerleader for the amazing staff and students at KIPP DC.”

The bottom line remains: worst to most improved. Twenty years ago, no one could have foreseen this outcome. This could have happened in cities such as L.A., but it hasn’t — and doesn’t appear to be in their future.

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When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. charter board in 2011, and became KIPP’s overseer, he recalls visiting Schaeffler at her office and finding her and KIPP DC President Allison Fansler sharing an office.

 â€œMany great charters are like great British rock and roll bands. They always had two key people, and it was the genius between the two that made the band great,” he said. “Here you had the CEO of a multimillion-dollar organization and she shared an office. It wasn’t five minutes that went by that they didn’t talk to one another. Constant interaction.”

Fansler shared an office with Schaeffler for 16 years. Whenever a call came in about a problem at a school site, Fansler said Schaeffler would immediately grab her coat and head out. The two of them, no matter which bolted for the door, shared a text code for that: Imonmyway.

Deputy Mayor Paul Kihn said when he sees his cell phone light up with Schaeffler’s name, “I know I am going to get an earful on behalf of her students. She is going to tell me the real story about how something is working and what I need to do to fix it. I am incredibly sorry to see her go.”

Of all the reformers who helped with D.C.’s recovery, Rhee and Schaeffler probably qualify as the fiercest. As Kihn puts it, “Susan is a force of nature.”

All you need is the patience to wait for that fifth idea to pop up.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham sits on ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

In theory, the ACA shouldn’t have affected public school districts all that much. Most already offered health care plans that met the ACA’s requirements to at least cover 10 “,” and a “Cadillac Tax” on high-cost plans that had been included in the original bill was delayed and then eventually . 

Teachers were and remain more likely than other workers to have access to health care benefits. They also are than private-sector professionals to receive ancillary benefits, like coverage for dental, vision and prescription drugs, and continued benefits after retirement.

But at the time ACA passed, school district health care costs were growing rapidly. According to a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics called the , the price tag for teacher health insurance benefits was rising at a rate of nearly 6% per year. In contrast, inflation was growing at just over 2% a year.

Observing these patterns in the broader economy, ACA champions talked about “bending the cost curve” and reducing the rate at which health care expenses would grow over time. 

It worked. Within public education, district health care costs immediately began to slow. And, in the last three years, the relationship has flipped entirely, with teacher health care costs growing considerably more slowly than inflation.

It’s not just happening in education. Private-sector employers are seeing similar improvements, as are other government-provided health programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid. 

One explanation for the slower rates of growth for employers might be that they have simply shifted more of the costs onto the backs of employees. Within education, for example, the share of medical care premiums for a typical individual health care plan picked up by employers has from 89% in 2010 to 85% in 2023. The comparable rate for family plans has also dipped, from 69 to 65%. 

In other words, school districts are asking teachers to pick up a slightly higher share of their health care benefits. By my rough calculations, that has cut the average educator’s take-home pay by a little more than $300 per year for those covered by individual plans and almost $900 for those using family plans. 

It’s also possible that the plans themselves have changed and shifted more costs onto workers through higher deductibles and co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses. That’s hard to prove for teachers specifically, but per-person out-of-pocket expenses have risen by about $175 since 2010, in real terms.

That’s not nothing. But it pales in comparison to the savings on the employer side. According to the bureau’s data mentioned above, districts are saving a little over 9% of each teacher’s salary thanks to the slowdown in health care costs post-ACA. That works out to an average saving of more than $6,000 per teacher, or roughly $25 billion nationwide. 

Of course, districts haven’t passed all those health care savings on to teachers, at least partly because districts have to stretch their budgets over more employees. 

Moreover, while districts may have seen their health care costs slow down, employee benefit costs overall continue to rise, thanks to large increases on the retirement side. As I noted in last summer, teacher pension costs are rising about 8% every year, and they have shown no signs of slowing down. 

In other words, district budget officials have gotten a measure of relief from the slowdown in health care expenses. But the average school employee may not be seeing or enjoying the benefits of these trends.

I took the long way around to get to this work. I was an animated film-maker …

… and a sheet metal worker and member of of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. I then spent almost eight years in the Air Force as a C-130 navigator.

To illustrate just how much technology has advanced since then, that box in the upper right corner of the photo contains a sextant, which was my primary means of navigating over water.

After leaving the service, I got my master’s in international affairs and began a freelance career as a .

I took work as a newsletter editor, back when the internet was a rumor, personal computers only did one thing at a time, and “cut and paste” meant scissors and glue.

My first article about a teachers union was published almost 30 years ago. For me, it was just another story, along with others I had written about California’s recycling program, or weird news I compiled and labeled “the outpost of the odd.”

But readers responded to the union story, so I wrote more, culminating in a 1994 long-form analysis of the California Teachers Association for the Golden State Center for Policy Studies. I called it “The Shadow Legislature.”

Three decades later, that’s still an accurate title.

Obviously, many things have changed in public education. When I started writing, charter schools were just a fledgling experiment and school choice an impossibility.

Unfortunately, many other things are almost exactly the same. I recently came across . It was about outcome-based education, and if you change some of the acronyms around and update the references, it could have been written last week.

Schrag described issues of textbook censorship, social engineering, performance-based assessments, phonics versus whole language and more. Then there is this paragraph:

“It’s striking how quickly our struggles about curriculum ideas escalate into quasi-religious controversies over social or moral absolutes. The right sees a conspiracy by the federal government and its secular humanist legions to strip parents of control over their children and inculcate them with relativistic values, witchcraft and satanism. The left looks at every parent who walks into a principal’s office complaining about a book or a school assignment as a tool of religious fanatics.”

See our full archive of Mike Antonucci’s Union Report

Schools are a political battleground, because everywhere is a political battleground. We can wish for things to be different, but we have to deal with the realities. My only goal for the past 30 years was to tell you the stories the teachers unions won’t. That’s all.

I couldn’t possibly list and thank all the folks who helped and supported me along the way. Some of them, on both sides of the divide, probably wouldn’t want to be mentioned by name anyway. But I do want to single out the good people, past and present, at this publication, ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. For the past seven years, they have been patient, kind and invaluable in making this column much better than it otherwise would have been. So thank you, Romy, Steve, Bev and the entire crew. I wish you much future success in your continuing mission to challenge the status quo.

Finally, thanks to you, my readers. All of you have made my long career, and now, happy retirement, possible.

God bless you all.

Signed by Gov. Dan McKee on June 1, creates a Dec. 31 deadline to develop and approve state-specific consumer education and personal finance standards. By the start of the 2022-23 school year, all public high schools in Rhode Island must offer a standards-aligned course.

“It’s very aggressive to get these standards up and running in the time frame that we have set out, but we know that it’s really necessary,” state Education Commissioner AngĂŠlica Infante-Green said. On average, , at $36,193.

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Having met with students statewide who felt they weren’t prepared to go onto college, and given the pandemic’s impact on student engagement, the commissioner told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ this moment was the time to solidify what they had built momentum behind for years.

“[Students] felt like this was something that they were being shortchanged [on]. So we made it a point to push this agenda.”

Rhode Island approved the national Council on Economic Education standards in 2014. On average only about 5 percent of Rhode Island students receive financial literacy education, according to the state education department, given that schools could choose whether or not to adopt the curricula.

Last year, senior Saloni Jain took a personal finance course in a hybrid learning setup, with three days of learning online, at the suburban East Greenwich High School. She said course simulations, like completing mock returns on and creating a budgeting spreadsheet, kept her engaged during virtual learning.

“We were getting paychecks — how do we put that money towards a 401(k) and pay all our bills and pay down our credit card or student loan debt? That was really helpful to visualize, you know, how we might live in the future,” Jain said. “It was just a one-semester course, but it honestly changed the way I think a lot.”

Nationally, have some version of financial literacy standards, which may be incorporated into math or civics classrooms, though be completed before graduation. 

In 2021, strengthening personal finance education. Advocates contend that literacy is key to breaking cycles of poverty, particularly as the younger generation deals with economic fallout from the pandemic. When loans, budgeting and debt management are explicitly explored during the school day, young people are exposed to as they head into adulthood.

A showed that financial literacy graduation requirements result in lower credit card balances and high-interest student loan debt for lower -income students, and decreases in private loans for higher-income students. Working- and lower-class students who took financial literacy courses were also able to work less while enrolled in college, which could encourage college persistence and graduation. Expanding access to personal finance courses and support homeownership down the line.

Even within states considered to have the strongest standards and requirements, students seek more real-world connections to prepare them for the future. Whitman Ochiai, who recently graduated from high school in Alexandria, Virginia, described his mandatory course as “more broad than it was deep”.

Left wondering about retirement decisions, building a balanced budget and the intuition behind large purchases, he started the in 2019 to explore thosetopics. He said there’s been increased interest throughout the pandemic, likely with more students working and families facing economic uncertainty.

“A lot of times the only people who have access to this information are the people who would have had access to it anyway,” Ochiai said. “Especially for first-generation college- goers and students, and parents that may not be homeowners, this is a pathway for them to have a deeper understanding of finance.”

Some Rhode Island teachers created elective courses in their schools in recent years, heeding students’ desires and seeing how financial literacy may enable connections to hard-to-grasp concepts like compounding interest. Before now though, funding and implementation was left to individual teachers or schools to prioritize.

Samantha Desmarais teaches math, financial literacy and computer science at Central Falls High School, which serves predominantly low-income Latino and Black students in a working class city just north of Providence. She hopes the legislation will open the door to financial support from the state for credentialing and hiring, building more capacity to teach the subject.

Otherwise, she said, “there’s going to be disproportionality between the districts that are able to shimmy around their budgets or their staff and make it work, and the districts that are weighted under all of these other things.”

Desmarais teaches about three sections of finance per year; enrollment is always on the higher side even with its elective status, at about 25 to 30 students per class. This fall, she’ll also teach a section for language learners, which introduces students to American money systems and credit.

“If you enjoy learning something today, spread that news and talk about it with your friends. There’s no reason why talking about money has to be this taboo subject,” she tells her students.

Advocates say that personal finance education provides an opportunity for students to break down any stigmas about money conversations before they head into large financial decisions, like student loans, car ownership and credit card debt. Lessons learned may also make their way home and support families facing economic challenges.

“I look at the state’s implementation of this guarantee of a financial education as sort of being a gateway to some meaningful engagement with families,” said Pat Page, vice president with the Rhode Island personal finance coalition and a business educator.

Page, Rhode Island’s former teacher of the year, has been a vocal advocate for broader financial education for years, and was one of the first in the state to teach a standalone course. She supported students, including Sunny Sait, in testifying in favor of broader financial education to the state legislature — in 2014, 2019 and again in 2021.

Though Sait took Page’s class two years ago, he said he still uses the concepts daily. Currently on a gap year after graduating this spring, he’s opened up a Roth IRA, and budgets his internship paycheck to make sure he can still afford things he loves, like karate.

“My mindset definitely shifted a little bit from thinking of money in terms of things, but instead thinking of money as a means for growth, saving and investing. I really had my focus shift from purchasing, like being a consumer, to becoming an investor.”

Many describe the effort to make financial literacy a reality for all Rhode Islanders as both a grassroots and grasstops effort, pushed by students and teachers, but also state leaders, like Treasurer Seth Magaziner, who helped introduce the legislation.

“The strongest advocates who worked very hard to get this bill passed were teachers and students. Students who very much wanted this to be taught, and teachers who are ready to teach it,” said Magaziner, who began his career as an elementary school teacher and his run for governor.

The treasurer and education commissioner both see the law’s signing as phase one of creating a broader financial literacy landscape in the state — their hope is to expand lessons to middle and elementary grades. The education, Magaziner says, will make a particular difference in Rhode Island.

“We do have a large rolling immigrant population, students who are English language learners. We have one of the highest poverty rates in the Northeast. Financial education is not a panacea, it’s not a cure-all, but it is an important part of the puzzle for how we solve these inequities, and correct them.”