By The Baron Banner Editorial Board
This past summer, California legislators passed a bill for a semester-long personal finance graduation requirement. With this change marking the second semester-long high school graduation requirement to be added for the next five years, The Baron Banner Editorial Board expresses our concern with California’s implementation of these requirements without considering the impacts on course scheduling for high school staff and students.
Assembly Bill (AB) 2927 requires high schools to offer a one-semester financial literacy course in the 2027-2028 school year for the Class of 2031. Per AB 101, high schools must offer one-semester ethnic studies by next school year for the Class of 2029.
Currently, most freshmen at FVHS take health paired with an additional elective in the adjacent semester.
However, for freshmen with impacted schedules, they take health in other formats, including asynchronous or hybrid. If ethnic studies were to be paired in the adjacent semester, freshmen with impacted schedules would need to fulfill this requirement in a similar manner.
But the model ethnic studies curriculum released by the state lists generating discussions as a key principle and since freshmen students have not taken a high school history course yet, this raises concerns of the potential lack of face-to-face and critical conversations in an asynchronous environment.
And although AB 101 allows personal finance to substitute the separate economics requirement, we wonder how students taking classes such as AP Macroeconomics, which have set curricula for the AP exam, may have to find additional formats to fulfill their requirements.
When students pursue alternatives, the lack of in-person instruction and classroom discussion means the loss of the intended educational impact of requiring these courses. While there may be potential merits to taking these courses, the additional requirements — and the scheduling conflicts they cause — may end up diminishing the state legislators’ intended purpose to support the futures of adolescents.
