Financial education is reaching more students in the U.S. than ever before. With 39 states now requiring personal finance education for high school graduation, 13 million students nationwide have access to curriculum designed to help them navigate real-world financial decisions with confidence.
As we recognize Financial Literacy Month this April, it's clear that expanding access is only part of the equation. For financial education to make a lasting difference, teachers need support to bring it to life in the classroom. Through FinEd50, Visa and its partners at the Council for Economic Education (CEE) are working to close that gap – training more than 4,000 educators since the coalition was founded in 2022 to ensure that new graduation requirements can deliver meaningful classroom experiences for students.
Here's how that work is playing out in schools across the country.
Meeting students where they are
A graduation requirement can open the door to financial education, but what happens inside the classroom depends on whether the content actually connects with students' lives.
That's the challenge Jennifer Belisle thinks about every day at Marlboro High School in Massachusetts, where many of her students are new to the country or still learning English. For them, abstract financial concepts aren't just difficult to engage with – they can feel entirely disconnected from students’ real lives.
"They want to know the here and now," Jennifer said. "Where do I go to get a bank account? How do I pay bills? What does interest actually mean for me?"
Jennifer participated in one of CEE's in-person, professional development workshops focused on how students' backgrounds and financial realities influence how they learn personal finance. It also provided classroom‑ready materials and lesson plans designed around real‑world decision‑making, giving educators tools they can take directly to their students.
Following the training, Jennifer made a small but meaningful change – renaming her course from "Foundations of Personal Finance" to "Budgeting 101," signaling to her students that what they were about to learn was meant for them.
Building confidence through hands-on leaning
In Jennifer's classroom, students grocery shop in a simulated environment, receive mock paychecks, and work through real-life scenarios like a car repair or other unexpected expenses. Each year, the school hosts a Reality Fair, placing students in a simulated economy where they choose careers, manage income, and interact with community volunteers acting as bankers, landlords, and business owners.
Bruckner Knight, a financial literacy teacher at New Mission High School in Massachusetts, attended CEE's full-day, in-person workshop in December. Four years into teaching financial literacy, he came looking to sharpen his practice.
In one training exercise, students were given a budget and a life scenario, an occupation, a place to live, expenses coming out of college, and have to work out whether the numbers actually add up. Seeing the real gap between income and expenses, taxes included, Bruckner says makes the lesson land in a way that definitions on a page never could.
"Working together, working in groups — incorporating that into my practice has helped tremendously," he said.
In his classroom today, Bruckner places a stronger emphasis on interactive, group-based learning.
Preparing students for real-life decisions
The simulations and exercises are preparation for decisions students will face sooner than they might expect. Justin Kaeser, Math and Business Department Lead at Farmington High School in Connecticut, attended CEE's annual conference in New Orleans on a teacher scholarship.
Following the conference, Justin redesigned Farmington's personal finance course around real-world scenarios, including a budgeting simulation where students navigate unexpected life events and have to rethink their priorities when resources change. The conversations that follow about values, tradeoffs, and financial realities are often the most memorable of the year.
"Especially once they start to have their first job," Justin said, "they begin to understand what it really means when you sign up for a credit card with high interest, or how much you actually pay overtime for a car or a house."
With Connecticut set to require a financial literacy credit for the Class of 2027, those conversations are about to become part of every student's high school experience.