Is a high school course with personal finance concepts required to be taken as a graduation requirement? No, Washington state requires high school students to complete several courses in social studies, including U.S. history, Washington state history and contemporary world history. See: Washington Minimum High School Graduation Requirements.
In 2015, Washington amended a law to require the Superintendent of Education to integrate financial education, skills and content knowledge into the state learning standards. See: Washington State Legislation for Financial Education (see page 7). Washington adopted grades Kindergarten through 12 financial education learning standards and guidelines in September 2016. Learning standards define what all students need to know and be able to do at each grade level. Washington school districts are required to provide all students in grades nine through 12 access to these standards. See: Washington Law Requiring Districts to Provide Access and Washington Personal Finance Standards FAQs. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction continues to work with educators and other stakeholders to develop resources tied to these standards and identify implementation models that school districts can adopt. See: Washington K-12 Personal Finance Standards. Washington allows each school district to determine how it will deliver that instruction.
While Washington requires all school districts to provide access to personal finance instruction, many delivery mechanisms are allowed to meet this requirement. Districts may provide instruction through "a regularly scheduled class period, before or after school, during lunch periods, at library and study time, at home, via online learning opportunities, through career and technical education course equivalencies, or other opportunities." Districts must provide access to this instruction but are not required to make students participate in the instruction. Any voluntary programming that requires a high school student to come to school early or stay late, adds additional homework (like an online program), or skip lunch or study time will likely result in far fewer students taking the instruction than if it is offered as a stand-alone elective. The Center for Financial Literacy is treating the state requirement to provide access to personal finance instruction as similar to requiring a high school to offer a stand-alone personal finance elective to all students. For this reason, Washington earns a grade of C. Unlike a semester elective course, which requires 60 hours of instruction, the Washington requirement does not specify the number of instruction hours required to meet the access rule. The delivery mechanisms identified could be very short in duration and could greatly discourage attendance by being extremely inconvenient for students. There is a large risk that some high schools and school districts will meet the access requirement in a manner that is so inconvenient that only a small percentage of students will take advantage of the personal finance instruction offering. It is not clear how Washington will measure student achievement in financial literacy or how the state monitors local school district implementation of the financial literacy education requirement.