Texas is at a crossroads.
One path builds personal financial literacy on the principles that made Texas and America prosperous: free enterprise, entrepreneurship, private property, opportunity cost, personal responsibility, delayed gratification, and the belief that ordinary people can build extraordinary lives through hard work and wise decisions.
The other follows a growing movement toward national financial literacy frameworks led by organizations such as Next Gen Personal Finance whose founders support Gavin Newsome and Ro Khanna. These frameworks teach valuable consumer financial skills, but they give far less attention to the free enterprise principles and wealth-building habits that have long defined Texas’ approach to economic education.
That distinction matters.
Texas rightly requires students to study the failures of communism. And Texas appropriately requires students to learn personal financial literacy. But warning students about failures of communism without teaching the principles that made America the world’s most prosperous nation is like teaching disease without teaching health. SB 24 identifies the threat. Personal financial literacy should provide the antidote.
The concern is not that students will learn budgeting, banking, taxes, investing, or credit. They absolutely should. The concern is that a national framework can gradually redefine what personal financial literacy means by emphasizing financial transactions while minimizing the ideas that make wealth creation possible.
Curriculum always reflects choices.
Without a foundation in free enterprise, students receive an incomplete picture of financial success. They learn how to manage student loans, compare insurance policies, identify consumer behavior, and finance a vehicle. What they are less likely to learn is what previous generations understood instinctively: every financial decision involves a trade-off.
Forgoing today’s wants made tomorrow’s opportunities possible. Saving for a down payment instead of spending every available dollar, investing instead of consuming, working extra hours to build a business, and living below one’s means were not simply financial decisions. They reflected values—personal responsibility, sacrifice, optimism, and confidence that today’s discipline would produce tomorrow’s prosperity.
Every dollar we spend reflects what we value.
Buying coffee every morning, ordering food delivery several nights a week, financing expensive consumer goods, or taking vacations beyond one’s means are not merely lifestyle choices. They are opportunity costs. Money spent today cannot be invested tomorrow. Small decisions, repeated consistently over decades, compound into dramatically different financial outcomes.
Those are the habits that built the American middle class.
If students never learn the connection between values, choices, and long-term prosperity, they may conclude that wealth is something people inherit rather than something millions of Americans have built through discipline, perseverance, and entrepreneurship. That concern is heightened by a 2025 Cato/YouGov survey showing that 62 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 viewed socialism favorably and 34 percent viewed communism favorably. At the same time, popular culture increasingly portrays wealth of Baby Boomers as evidence of privilege rather than years of sacrifice, risk-taking, and delayed gratification.
Students should understand why inflation changes what families can afford at the grocery store, how interest rates determine whether a first home is within reach, and how taxes affect the prices consumers pay every day. In Texas, they should understand how supply and demand influence housing prices and why businesses respond to market incentives. These are not abstract economic theories. They are the realities students will face as consumers, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, homeowners, and voters.
If we want students to become informed voters, they must first become informed economic thinkers.
Personal financial literacy should offer a different message.
It should teach students that economic freedom, combined with personal responsibility, gives ordinary people the opportunity to build extraordinary lives. In a state where 99.8 percent of businesses are small businesses, every student should graduate believing they could one day own one.
That requires teaching more than budgeting and banking. It requires teaching entrepreneurship, delayed gratification, opportunity cost, wealth creation, and the free enterprise principles that have enabled generations of Texans to create businesses, jobs, and prosperity.
This is not just a Texas problem.
Next Gen Personal Finance has publicly stated its goal of expanding its financial literacy framework nationwide by 2030. Nearly thirty states have already opened the gate, adopting its underlying priorities, and a California anti-business, anti-free enterprise mindset at the expense of the principles, wealth-building habits, and culture of industry, responsibility, and opportunity that helped build this country.
Texas should not surrender its longstanding commitment to teaching the principles of free enterprise in exchange for a one-size-fits-all national model. The question before us is simple: Will Texas allow outside organizations to define what personal financial literacy means for our students, or will we continue to teach the ideas that have made Texas and America a place where ordinary people can build extraordinary lives?
