North Carolina - 2023

Final Grade

B

Projected Grade

A

Graduation Requirements

Is a high school course with personal finance concepts required to be taken as a graduation requirement? Yes, in 2017, North Carolina passed a law requiring high school students to receive financial literacy instruction. The State Board of Education (BOE) determined that the course used to implement the required instruction is the full academic year course titled Founding Principles, Civics and Economics.

Projected Grade Narrative

Grade A for the Class of 2024. In 2019, a law was passed requiring students entering grade 9 in the 2020–2021 academic year (Class of 2024) to take a full-credit course (full-year course) focused solely on Economics and Personal Finance (EPF) as a high school graduation requirement. The BOE was required to adopt standards for this course that are at a minimum as rigorous as national standards in economics and financial literacy that were developed by the Council for Economic Education. Students taking this full-year course will receive the equivalent of a half-year course in personal finance. The law also requires educators to complete an EPF professional development course in order to teach this course.

High School Education Standards

There are 10 standards for the Founding Principles, Civics and Economics course. Two of the standards pertain to personal finance. Based on this information, we estimate that students receive approximately 24 hours of personal finance instruction in a full-year course based on a Carnegie Unit (120 hours of instruction).

Extra Credit

The Department of Public Instruction has created a website that provides financial literacy resources.

Caveat

It is not clear how North Carolina measures student achievement in financial literacy. The 2019 law requires students to take an Economics and Personal Finance course as a graduation requirement. The law gives the training role for educators teaching this course exclusively to a nonprofit organization in the state—the North Carolina Council of Economic Education (NCCEE). It is not clear that the best professional development training for EPF educators is exclusively offered by the NCCEE.

Year Of Projected Grade

2024