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'Checkbook Math' Increasingly Rare

This is what high standards gets you: kids who muddle through calculus but haven't a clue about the disaster that awaits them if they don't pay off their credit card bills each month and don't know how to do their own income tax or figure out that sub-prime mortgages are a bad deal.

By Daniel de Vise


In her final year at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, Amber Rountree chose to take consumer math, a course designed to teach students how to balance a checkbook and shop for a home loan. She rates it the easiest math class she has taken in high school but also the most useful.

Once a common course offering, consumer math is being phased out as school systems raise their expectations of how much math students should know when they graduate. Twenty or 30 years ago, Algebra I might have sufficed. Today, that course is regarded as an absolute minimum, a gateway to Advanced Placement study and college. Students routinely take it in middle school.

That leaves consumer math and other "checkbook math" classes relegated to a handful of schools, mostly in poor communities. College-bound students generally avoid the class, reasoning that it would look bad on a transcript.

"In a lot of places, this course has been a dead-end street," said Francis "Skip" Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston.

The gradual elimination of the course from high schools comes as lawmakers, corporate leaders and many parents are decrying the financial illiteracy of the young. Fourteen states, including Virginia, have created new mandates for personal finance education since 1998, bringing the number of states with such requirements to 28, according to the National Council on Economic Education.

Montgomery County parents have pushed for financial literacy education. Fairfax County schools Superintendent Jack D. Dale said this year that the issue had come up "at 40 or 50 different public hearings" about what students should know by the time they graduate. One day last April, a group of business leaders, including Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, visited 17 D.C. high schools to teach a one-day lesson on the basics of budgeting, credit and identity theft.

Virginia lawmakers mandated personal finance education as an academic subject in 2005, three years after the state education department ceased to recognize consumer math as a course, deeming its content below the minimum standard for high school.

"Students were getting out of calculus, and they didn't have these basic consumer skills," said Frank Atchison, coordinator of mathematics in Fairfax schools.

Schools in Prince George's County haven't offered consumer math in at least a decade. Montgomery educators were considering dropping the course in 2009, but math department chairs unanimously favored keeping it, at least in spirit.

Montgomery education officials opted to create a more rigorous class, tentatively titled quantitative literacy. Leah Quinn, county mathematics supervisor, said her concern was that high school seniors learn "a higher level of math than arithmetic."

Although much of the math in the consumer math class at Blake High School is pre-algebraic, the exercises are uniquely suited to students nearing graduation. These students are discovering the world of online banking, used cars, revolving credit and taxation.

"This is actually the one class I think is realistic toward becoming an adult," said Rountree, 17. "We learn how to balance checkbooks, which is a life need. We've learned how to purchase a car on kelleybluebook.com. Consumer math is, I think, the one class that has actually helped me."

Most students in Mike Bayless's portable classroom are seniors who limped through previous math courses and need a fourth credit to graduate. The wall is covered with posters about arithmetic, the SAT and the benefits of graduation.

"If I've kept good records, this is the balance in my account," said Bayless, pacing up and down columns of desks on a recent morning. "If I have not kept good records, this is not the balance in my account. That's the purpose of reconciliation."

Over the course of the year, the students will learn how to shop for a loan, pay their taxes and negotiate for an hourly wage. It's as much math as Rountree thinks she will need in college.

"I want to major in physical therapy and special education," she said. "Numbers and shapes and equations aren't going to help me."

For the majority of students, who will never take consumer math, financial literacy is taught in bits and pieces scattered across several courses in middle and high school.

The financial literacy objectives adopted by the Virginia school board last year fill 20 pages. Essential skills include learning the benefits and risks of an ATM card and how to contest an errant bill. The state board lists several courses in which each skill might be taught.

"I think Virginia has done an excellent job of infusing these ideas, these big ideas about money management and financial literacy, into these courses that all students must take," said Atchison, the Fairfax math coordinator.

But the piecemeal approach might not be having the desired impact.

Jackie Lentz, a senior at McLean High School, said she could not remember any math class "that taught me how to balance a checkbook or pick out a cellphone plan." She recalled one lesson on family finance in her eighth-grade civics class, which was "eye-opening, but I don't believe anyone else took it seriously."

Kathleen Peacock, a senior at Damascus High School in Montgomery County, could recall only one financial literacy exercise, in middle school, on how to write a check.

Peacock considered taking consumer math in high school, "because I think it's something that is very important for everyone to learn how to do and should be required for every student." But she demurred, she said, because having the class on a transcript "doesn't look good for colleges."

Fennell, of the math teachers council, believes high schools should retool consumer math as a more rigorous course, with exercises rooted in algebra rather than arithmetic, exploring such topics as the complexities of a cellphone plan and the spiraling debt engendered by a credit card.

— Daniel de Vise
Washington Post
2007-12-02


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