The Kansas City Star, Mo., Kids and Business Column
By Steve Rosen, The Kansas City Star, Mo.
Nov. 20–SOFTWARE-BASED PROGRAM COULD BE A VALUABLE TEACHING TOOL: Mikel Miller has taken a worthy stand on a hot issue involving Kansas schoolchildren.
No, it has nothing to do with the debate over evolution in the state’s high school science curriculum, which has generated a national firestorm among scientists, educators, parents and religious advocates.
Instead, Miller has been quietly drumming up support in recent months for a new product that teaches financial and economic principles to children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
So far, initial interest has been encouraging, said Miller, president of the Wichita-based Kansas Council on Economic Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes financial literacy.
Indeed, if Miller is successful, Kansas could lay claim to being a nationwide leader in teaching schoolchildren economics and money management skills.
The new teaching tool — a software-based program called Financial Foundations for Kansas Kids — is being launched amid increasing evidence that the majority of America’s schoolchildren lack a clear understanding of basic economic and personal finance principles. Based on test results, many kids would appear to be hard-pressed to explain compound interest or tell the difference between stocks and bonds.
Kansas, like a growing number of states, has passed legislation that sets financial education standards in schools at every grade level. But it has been difficult for teachers to put principles into practice partly because of time and training issues and the demands of meeting the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Plus, individual school districts have the authority to decide how much to stress financial education.
“It’s not hard to see we’ve got a problem when it comes to teaching kids about money,” Miller said.
To show kids how money and markets work, the Kansas council developed 75 lessons, more than 350 exercises and 28 hours of classroom learning on a single CD. There’s even a training program for teachers, plus additional online lesson plans at www.financialfoundationsforkids.com.
Unlike many other financial education products, Financial Foundations’ exercises not only meet national and state standards for personal finance and economics, but also address math, reading and social studies skills.
As Kansas Board of Education member Carol Rupe sees it, “This is not an add-on curriculum, but a supplement to what teachers are already doing in those subjects.”
While the interactive story lines developed by Nexlearn of Wichita are not full of razzle-dazzle, I found the lessons to be creative and engaging. The material is broken into three grade levels: K-2, 3-5 and 6-8. Each has a different set of animated characters — Buddy Bargain and the Gang, Sydney Goodcents and Friends, and the kids from the Moolah Report — who explain economic concepts such as incentives, competition and inflation, and solve financial problems on their adventures.
Here’s a sample for kindergartners: Buddy Bargain and the Gang help youngsters identify which coins are pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters; Math problems require kids to determine the cost of a yo-yo, for example. In another lesson, kindergartners explore jobs and chores as a way of understanding the concept of producing goods and services and generating income.
The lessons are aimed at younger students rather than high schoolers, said Miller, because research shows children develop spending habits by second grade or earlier “while they are in the car seat and Mom drives through the ATM. … That’s why it’s important for children to learn this information early.”
The Kansas council’s goal is to introduce the software into the state’s 1,200 public grade schools and middle schools over the next three years. The CD is free to schools in the state, which eliminates a potential hurdle for budget-strapped districts. Miller also hopes school districts around the country will order the course materials.
Miller thinks this learning approach is a great opportunity to help kids and it will pay dividends down the road.
“We’re building a base of elementary and middle school students who will be great economics students in high school,” she said. “Hopefully we won’t have to undo as many bad (financial) habits, and it will make parents’ jobs easier.”
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