Is a high school course with personal finance concepts required to be taken as a graduation requirement? Yes, beginning with the graduating Class of 2023, Louisiana law requires that all students receive personal financial management instruction as a requirement for high school graduation. A 2018 state law requires that high school student be taught the following personal finance topics prior to graduation: income, money management, spending and credit, saving and investing, and the process and responsibilities, including repayment and default, of borrowing money to fund postsecondary education opportunities. This law applies to students entering into 9th grade on or after July 1, 2019 (the Class of 2023). The classes of 2014 to 2017 were required by law to take civics and free enterprise course as a graduation requirement, and that course included personal finance instruction. The classes of 2018 to 2022 were allowed to substitute the civics and free enterprise course with three other courses that did not include substantive financial literacy instruction. During this period of time, Louisiana's grade dropped to a D. From 2018 to 2022, students could graduate from high school with very modest levels of financial literacy instruction. Instruction hours cannot be estimated for the class of 2023 since each local school district selects how it will meet the personal finance education requirement.
Grade A for the Class of 2027. In June 2023, the governor signed into law a bill that requires students graduating in academic year 2026–2027 to complete a 1-unit financial literacy course in order to graduate from a public high school. Louisiana offers two pathways to graduation: a career-focused diploma, referred to as the TOPS Tech Diploma pathway, and one for college-bound students, referred to as the TOPS University Diploma pathway. Prior law required a student to complete 4 mathematics credits to be eligible for a TOPS Tech Diploma. The new law requires that the financial literacy course be one of the 4 math credits required for this diploma. Prior law required a student to complete 19 units of high school coursework to be eligible for a TOPS University Diploma. The new law retains all existing requirements and increases the total number of required units to 20, adding the new 1-unit financial literacy course requirement. The new law specifies minimum content components of the new financial literacy course.
The Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) has created academic standards that define what students should know. Included in the high school social studies academic standards are standards for a full-year civics course that includes financial literacy concepts. As described above, students are not required to take the civics course in order to graduate from high school; there are other substitutes. However, all students must receive personal finance instruction according to state law prior to graduation. The high school civics standards include 14 framing standards, and two of these standards (14% of the total standards) are personal finance concepts. Based on this information, financial literacy content is estimated to be approximately 17 hours of instruction in this full-year course. The DOE also provides a sample scope and sequence document for the civics course. This document has 6 units of study with 1 unit being personal finance. Each unit has a recommended period of time that should be allocated to that unit. The personal finance unit is for four to five weeks out of a maximum of 35.5 weeks. If this sequence of study is used, we estimate 17 hours of instruction time.
State law requires that the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education shall establish and maintain a clearinghouse for instructional materials and information regarding model financial education programs and best practices.
It is not clear how Louisiana measures student achievement in financial literacy or how the state monitors local school district implementation of the financial literacy education requirement.
2027