Starting with the 2026-2027 school year, millions of American high school students will be required to pass a personal finance course to graduate—but according to a new analysis, many will be getting a lesson in something far more contentious than balancing a checkbook.
Thirty states are either phasing in the requirement or have already adopted it, and nine more require personal finance content to be woven into other courses. Yet the curriculum used in many classrooms, the free open education resource NextGen Personal Financial Literacy (NGPF), goes beyond car loans and insurance premiums. In a piece published by American Thinker, education policy advisor Carole Hornsby Haynes warns that each year five million students in more than 50,000 classrooms across all 50 states are being taught that they are victims of slavery—which ended 161 years ago—and are being instructed on how reparations might “redress the harms of slavery and violence against Black Americans and other historically excluded communities.”
Haynes, a national curriculum advisor and historian, argues the NGPF materials fuse personal finance with race-based Marxist ideology under the banner of “Culturally Responsive Teaching.” She points to specific units: one on financial wealth asks students to analyze how “financial practices have led to modern racial inequities in the United States”; a housing unit claims racial discrimination remains a barrier to Black homeownership, requiring students to examine policies that “have prevented, and continue to prevent, communities of color from generating wealth”; and a unit on education and employment asserts racial discrimination has impacted access to higher education, student debt, and wages. What is missing, she says, is any acknowledgment that affirmative action has favored Black applicants over whites.
Because NGPF is a free, downloadable open resource, Haynes notes, teachers can use it without district or state approval and without taxpayer funding—so there is little institutional friction when it reaches classrooms. She argues the curriculum’s design is not neutral: it pre-determines that students will be indoctrinated into a narrative of victimization rather than encouraged to conduct unbiased research.
The piece takes particular aim at the factual basis for reparations. Haynes urges students researching the topic to consult Thomas Sowell’s “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality,” which she says documents a pervasive public misperception that three out of four Black Americans live in poverty. In reality, according to the 2020 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, the Black poverty rate is 18.8 percent—fewer than one in five. She suggests that racial demagogues, including Al Sharpton, have a political and financial interest in perpetuating the false image of widespread Black poverty.
Haynes also points to Keith Richburg’s “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” in which the author concludes that descendants of enslaved Africans brought to America are far better off than those who remained in Africa. Richburg, she quotes, wrote: “Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive. Thank God I am an American.” She notes that even with modern medical technology introduced during European colonization, sub-Saharan Africa still includes some of the world’s poorest countries, plagued by disease, war, famine, and military dictatorships.
Haynes argues that American Blacks are not an “oppressed class” in any global sense: they are richer than 90 percent of the world’s population, live longer than African and Caribbean Blacks and even whites in much of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and have higher literacy rates and more postsecondary degrees than Blacks in Africa.
She then raises the thorny practical questions reparations proponents rarely address. Who would pay—the descendants of Civil War-era Southerners who owned no slaves, or the descendants of post-Civil War immigrants who had little connection to slavery and now constitute the majority of white Americans? And who would receive payments—descendants of Blacks who were free before emancipation, or African and Caribbean émigrés who arrived after the Civil War?
In Haynes’s view, implicit reparations are already being made through welfare programs and affirmative action, which she says has allowed Black students and workers to enter universities and jobs based on preferential criteria. She calls reparations not only unnecessary but an insult to the millions of successful Black Americans who have lifted themselves out of poverty without them.
The piece concludes with a blunt assertion: “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.”
Haynes urges parents to be vigilant about what their children are learning, to exercise their rights to have NGPF materials removed from classrooms, and to consider alternatives such as private schools, microschools, or homeschooling.
The debate over how personal finance education is taught—and what political lessons come with it—is likely to intensify as the 2026-2027 academic year approaches.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/personal-finance-and-the-road-to-reparations/