Do schools get an F in personal finance education?

High school graduates will soon be entering the workforce with diplomas in hand but without a basic knowledge of personal finance.

Currently, only 24 states require any kind of personal finance education in high schools. What’s worse? Only five states received “As” for their financial literacy curriculum, according to a recent National Report Card from the Champlain College Center for Financial Literacy in Burlington, Vermont.

And at home, many parents are reluctant to broach the topic. One of the challenges facing today’s financial literacy advocates is that parents feel decidedly unqualified to teach their own kids — as many as 44% of parents said they were “extremely reluctant” to discuss money with their kids in a 2017 T. Rowe Price survey.

So what’s the solution?

Start school-based education earlier. Although middle schools have state-testing requirements of their own, they are nowhere near as common or rigorous as those that high school educators face. That leaves room for financial education.

Once the education is delivered, it should be followed with incentives to make sure it sticks. One idea: Add 20 personal finance questions to the driver’s license permit exam, and encourage auto insurers to offer discounts to students who score particularly well on this section of the test.

This makes sense; they’re already doing almost the same thing for adults by giving cheaper rates to those with excellent credit scores. Involving the insurers is a way to bring parents into the process, too. We parents know that adding teen drivers to the family policy is likely to boost our quarterly premiums into the stratosphere.

Naysayers may wonder if 20 questions are enough. I suspect they might be. In 2007, Wells Fargo conducted an experiment where they offered college students who applied for their credit cards a small premium — a phone card worth about $1 — to take a 15-minute online tutorial. Then Wells Fargo tracked the behavior of the students who took the course against a control group. Despite using their cards more, participants maintained lower revolving balances and were 40 percent more likely to pay their bills on time and stay within their pre-set spending limits; precisely the sort of responsibility financial literacy education tries to instill. Fifteen minutes.

Add some education in the middle grades and we may have a shot at a money-smart generation after all.