How we research each state

Informational only, not legal advice. Each state page describes what published law and standards say. It is not a legal opinion and it is a snapshot dated by its “last verified” line.

Overview

For every state and DC, CENTS reads what the law and academic standards say about financial education in kindergarten through eighth grade, and records one status. Every claim is tied to an official source, an exact excerpt and a date. A separate check re-reads each source, and anything we cannot confirm is shown as under review rather than guessed. This page is the technical reference; the rest of the site links here for the details.

The process

1. Find the primary sources. The legislature or official code site, the state education agency and the state board.
2. Read and excerpt. Copy a short excerpt (25 words or fewer) for each claim, with the citation and the date retrieved.
3. Assign a status. One value, decided by the K-8 question, using the definitions below.
4. Verify. A reviewer who did not write the record re-reads every source, and an automated pass searches each source for its excerpt.
5. Apply the display rule. Only high or medium confidence shows a status. Everything else shows as under review.
6. Publish and correct. Records are published with their sources, and errors are fixed in public (see Corrections).

What each kind of evidence shows

Law

What a statute or rule requires: which grades, whether it must be taught, and from when. This is what a status mainly rests on.

Academic standards

What students are expected to learn, grade by grade. Standards describe content; they are not by themselves a mandate to teach it.

District documentation

What a school district says, in writing, that it provides. Currently available for North Carolina only, as a separate audit with its own methodology.

Classroom implementation

What happens in classrooms. CENTS does not observe classrooms, so none of its findings measure implementation or student outcomes.

Sources

A status rests on primary sources only: the state legislature or official code site, the state education agency, and the state board of education’s rules and standards. Every claim carries a source link, a verbatim excerpt of 25 words or fewer, the statute section, rule or resolution it comes from, and the date we retrieved it. A copy of a statute hosted by a third party (an association, a mirror, a code publisher) is not treated as primary.

Summaries from advocacy and research groups (for example Next Gen Personal Finance, the Council for Economic Education, Jump$tart and EverFi) are used only as leads and cross-checks. Where one disagrees with a primary source, the difference is recorded on the state page.

Status definitions

Each state gets one value, decided by the K-8 question. When more than one could apply, the first that applies is used, in the order of the key below:

When K-8 standards count

One rule is applied to every jurisdiction. K-8 content counts as personal-finance standards only if it names a personal-finance concept (earning, saving, spending, budgeting, credit or borrowing) at two or more K-8 grade levels. Money or coin arithmetic alone (counting coins, making change, money word problems) does not count, and content at a single K-8 grade level does not meet the rule. A state whose standards do not meet it, and that has a high school requirement, is shown as “No K-8 personal-finance standards found”. That label describes what was found. It is not proof that no such standards, or no requirement, exist: a document we could not read, or a concept worded in a way the rule does not recognise, would not appear here.

Requirement before grade 9, and how grades are read

A “requirement before grade 9” is a statute or rule that requires financial education and reaches at least one grade before ninth. (The data code for this category is still k8_requirement.) Every record states the earliest grade covered (kindergarten, or grade 1 to 12) and the grade range the requirement reaches. The grades come from the law in one of two ways, applied the same way to every jurisdiction:

• Grade numbers. The law names grades, for example “kindergarten through grade twelve” or “grades 3 to 12”.
• School levels. A law that names both elementary and middle schools (or the primary, intermediate and middle levels) is treated as naming a K-8 range, with elementary beginning at kindergarten. A law that names only a high school level is a high school requirement, and a law that names no grade and no level is “Requirement, grades not specified”.

Some of these requirements begin only in grade 6 or 7 (for example grades 6-8, or 7-12). They are still a requirement before grade 9, because they reach a grade before ninth, and the earliest grade is shown next to the label so the difference is visible.

A law whose operative verb is “offer” (for example districts “shall offer courses” or “must offer students instruction”) is marked “offer courses” wherever its status is shown. It requires districts to make the courses or instruction available; it does not say that every student must receive it.

Requirement, grades not specified

This status is for a statute or rule that says, in operative language such as “shall” or “must”, that students receive instruction in personal finance or financial literacy (or that the program of instruction includes it), and names no grade or grade range. It is a requirement, but the text does not show that it reaches kindergarten through grade 8, so it is kept apart from “requirement before grade 9”. Permissive wording (“may”, “is encouraged”), a directive only to adopt standards, and standards on their own do not count.

Archived copies

When an agency’s own page or file could not be read directly (its site blocks automated access, or the file has moved), a record may cite an Internet Archive copy of that same agency file. Every such source shows both the agency’s original address and the date the archive captured it.

“Under review” is how we display a state whose sources conflict, could not be reached, or support only a low-confidence reading. Its page lists the sources found so far and states no conclusion. It is never a finding that no requirement exists.

6 jurisdictions are under review today, and what is missing for each:

• Hawaii: capitol.hawaii.gov blocked to automated access: bill status for HB865 and SR192 not read.
• Minnesota: education.mn.gov standards pages and the draft 2024 personal finance guidance PDF: robots.txt disallows or blocks them.
• Oklahoma: oklegislature.gov statute text of 70 O.S. 11-103.6h blocked by robots.txt.
• Rhode Island: RIDE financial literacy page (ride.ri.gov/instruction-assessment/financial-literacy) blocked by Cloudflare challenge.
• Tennessee: needs a manual read of (1) the Tennessee Academic Standards for Social Studies, K-8 economics strands, current revised edition (the PDF on tn.gov returned HTTP 403 on robots.txt after the first fetch) - extract every K-8 standard naming earning, saving, spending, budgeting, credit or borrowing, with grade and code; (2) Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 and the 2023 public chapter on financial literacy reporting for elementary and middle schools (capitol.tn.gov disallows crawlers) - extract any sentence requiring personal-finance instruction and whether it names grades; (3) State Board of Education Rule 0520-01-03-.06 (Secretary of State host returns HTTP 403) - extract the personal finance graduation requirement text.
• West Virginia: needs a manual read of West Virginia Board of Education Policy 2520.4 (Social Studies), effective July 1, 2025 - the Secretary of State copy at https://apps.sos.wv.gov/adlaw/csr/readfile.aspx?DocId=57085&Format=PDF has no text layer (open it in a browser or run OCR), and the Board's own copy is on wveis.k12.wv.us, whose robots.txt disallows crawlers.

Public display rule

A status badge and the “what’s missing for K-8” text are shown only when our confidence is high or medium. High means the operative primary text was read in full. Medium means a primary source supports the status but part of the picture (for example a standards document) could not be read in full. Everything else shows as “Under review.”

Verification

After a state is researched, a separate reviewer, who did not write the record, re-fetches every cited URL, confirms the excerpt appears in the source, and checks that the source supports the claim and that the status is justified. A second automated check re-fetches each URL and searches for the excerpt. Failures and unreadable sources go to a review queue and are not counted as passes.

Our crawler follows each site’s robots.txt, makes at most one request per second to a host, and does not use proxies, logins or workarounds. If an official site blocks automated access, we look for another primary source, such as the state education agency’s own document. If none can be reached, the state stays under review.

Known limits

• Reading law involves judgement. A general statute that says instruction is provided “for all students” without naming grades is quoted and described neutrally; whether it amounts to a requirement for at least one grade before ninth can be arguable.
• Standards documents change, and some are large. A state can have K-8 personal finance content we did not find.
• Some requirements are regulations or board rules, not statutes. We say which.
• The “pending bills” lists are not an exhaustive legislative search; bill pages are often behind bot challenges we do not attempt to bypass.
• Only North Carolina has a records audit of its districts. That audit is a case study, not a national dataset.

Corrections

If a record is wrong or out of date, use the corrections form or email corrections@centscampaign.org with the state or page, what is wrong, and the source that shows the correct information. We open the primary source. If it supports the correction, we change the entry and update its last-verified date; if not, we leave the entry and say why. Every change is added to the public change log. For questions about the method or the data, write to policy@centscampaign.org.