'Checkbook Math' Increasingly Rare

Blake High students Karim Mosleh, 17, left, Nicholas Sturdivant, 17, Mario Saenz, 18, and Amber Rountree, 17, work together in a consumer math class. "We learn how to balance checkbooks, which is a life need. . . . Consumer math is, I think, the one class that has actually helped me," Rountree said. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

Most students in Mike Bayless's portable classroom are seniors who limped through previous math courses and need a fourth credit to graduate. The wall is covered with posters about arithmetic, the SAT and the benefits of graduation.

"If I've kept good records, this is the balance in my account," said Bayless, pacing up and down columns of desks on a recent morning. "If I have not kept good records, this is not the balance in my account. That's the purpose of reconciliation."

Over the course of the year, the students will learn how to shop for a loan, pay their taxes and negotiate for an hourly wage. It's as much math as Rountree thinks she will need in college.

"I want to major in physical therapy and special education," she said. "Numbers and shapes and equations aren't going to help me."

For the majority of students, who will never take consumer math, financial literacy is taught in bits and pieces scattered across several courses in middle and high school.

The financial literacy objectives adopted by the Virginia school board last year fill 20 pages. Essential skills include learning the benefits and risks of an ATM card and how to contest an errant bill. The state board lists several courses in which each skill might be taught.

"I think Virginia has done an excellent job of infusing these ideas, these big ideas about money management and financial literacy, into these courses that all students must take," said Atchison, the Fairfax math coordinator.

But the piecemeal approach might not be having the desired impact.

Jackie Lentz, a senior at McLean High School, said she could not remember any math class "that taught me how to balance a checkbook or pick out a cellphone plan." She recalled one lesson on family finance in her eighth-grade civics class, which was "eye-opening, but I don't believe anyone else took it seriously."

Kathleen Peacock, a senior at Damascus High School in Montgomery County, could recall only one financial literacy exercise, in middle school, on how to write a check.

Peacock considered taking consumer math in high school, "because I think it's something that is very important for everyone to learn how to do and should be required for every student." But she demurred, she said, because having the class on a transcript "doesn't look good for colleges."

Fennell, of the math teachers council, believes high schools should retool consumer math as a more rigorous course, with exercises rooted in algebra rather than arithmetic, exploring such topics as the complexities of a cellphone plan and the spiraling debt engendered by a credit card.