As school starts for many, Texas freshman high school students will be joining students in 40 other states who are required to pass a course on personal financial literacy to graduate. Mount Vernon High School students are ahead of the requirements since MVISD began preparing students last fall for the transition.
“Our current sophomores will be the first group required to graduate under the new Personal Financial Literacy requirements,” noted Montana Tidwell, MVISD’s instructor for the course. “MVISD, students traditionally take Economics during their senior year. Because of that timing, we began transitioning from Economics to Personal Financial Literacy last year rather than waiting until the new requirements fully took effect.”
The need for more hands-on development of financial skills has been in the planning for around 5 years, as universities and think tanks became aware of a drop in the percentage of young adults who lacked the knowledge and skills to function on their own in the adult world.
As early as 2020, the TIAA Institute, in conjunction with another global personal finance group’s survey, found that before COVID-19, many Americans were financially fragile, primarily due to their lack of financial literacy. Young adults among those with the lowest levels are unable to answer basic financial questions, handle emergency expenses, or prepare for major financial changes. (1)
In 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas emphasized the need for change after a national financial capability study ranked Texans overall 43rd nationally in financial literacy and had been in the lower ranks of that study for more than a decade. (2-3)
The Texas Board of Education began work on rewriting high school graduation requirements and the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills criteria after the Texas Legislature passed HB27 and the governor signed it into law in June 2025. Before the new law, local students could meet graduation requirements by taking a half-credit Economics course or a combined Personal Financial Literacy and Economics course.
HB27 specifically called for removing Economics from the Personal Financial Literacy credit course. According to the Texas SBOE, they and lawmakers wanted to ensure practical instruction on real-life money management, not theoretical macroeconomics.
“Students will learn to make informed decisions about earning, spending, saving, investing, borrowing, insurance, taxes, and planning for the future. Our goal expands from understanding how the economy works to understanding how economic decisions affect them personally and how their choices today can shape their financial future and the economic future of America,” said Mr. Tidwell.
The somewhat hybrid course at MVISD will be fully transitioned in the next two years, according to Mr. Tidwell. The Personal Financial Literacy course's focus provides an opportunity to make it more relevant to students as they prepare to enter adulthood. It can connect the principles they learn in the classroom to decisions they will soon be making with real money, real responsibility, and real consequences.
The course will use real-world scenarios and decision-making activities that require students to think through situations they are likely to encounter after high school. Things such as building a budget, evaluating a paycheck, understanding credit and debt, comparing financial products, planning for major purchases, saving and investing, and understanding the long-term consequences of financial decisions.
The classroom should be a place where students can make mistakes, ask questions, and learn from their decisions before they make them with real money and the consequences that come with it.
“We want students to understand that financial literacy is ultimately about ownership of their financial lives. There isn’t a single financial plan that works for everyone, but there are sound principles that can help people make better decisions. Our goal is for students to leave the course with the knowledge and the confidence to apply those principles as they move into adulthood.”
With the establishment of Personal Financial Literacy as a half-credit one-semester course required for graduation, other options are open. Students’ third social studies credit will include a full credit Economics, World Geography, or World History course. A student’s graduation plan will likely determine which of those would be selected.
This is Mr. Tidwell’s second year teaching in the field of economics at MVHS. He teaches U.S. Government and Economics in Room 401 of the main high school building. He will be an instructor for a new program at MVISD, Principles of Construction.
(1) Building up financial literacy and financial resilience https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7393029
(2) Turbulent economy tests Texans who lack financial knowledgehttps://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2022/swe2201/swe2201c
(3) National Association of State Boards of Education: Advancing HS Financial Literacy https://www.nasbe.org/advancing-high-schoolers-financial-literacy/
