Texas has spent decades defending its right to determine what is taught in Texas classrooms, resisting federal pressure, national standards, and outside influence because Texans understand a simple principle: Texas students deserve Texas standards.
That principle is now being tested again.
The debate surrounding Personal Financial Literacy may sound technical, but it raises a much larger question: Who is deciding what Texas students learn?
At first glance, House Bill 27 appeared to be a straightforward effort to improve financial literacy. Most legislators likely believed they were helping students learn practical skills such as budgeting, taxes, saving, investing, and credit management.
But underneath the bill was a significant shift in philosophy.
Texas removed economics from the graduation requirement by name, stripping away much of the free enterprise foundation that traditionally distinguished Texas personal finance instruction. At the same time, the bill created a pathway for free open educational resources to enter Texas classrooms outside the traditional instructional materials review process.
Many well-intentioned policymakers may not have realized the implications.
Today, the State Board of Education is considering Personal Financial Literacy standards that move even further away from entrepreneurship, free enterprise, and foundational economic principles. If adopted, students may learn how to balance a checkbook while never learning why inflation increases grocery prices, why housing costs rise, why wages change, or how entrepreneurs create wealth and opportunity.
Personal financial literacy without economics is not financial literacy.
It is bookkeeping.
Students cannot fully understand saving without understanding incentives. They cannot understand investing without understanding markets. They cannot understand inflation without understanding economics. They cannot understand prosperity without understanding free enterprise. And they cannot make informed decisions at the ballot box.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
Texas law requires students to learn about the failures and atrocities of communist systems. Yet as Texas expands instruction on the dangers of communism, it is simultaneously removing instruction on the very principles that serve as the alternative: private property, entrepreneurship, competition, voluntary exchange, and economic freedom.
If students are taught why communist systems failed but never taught why free enterprise succeeded, they are receiving only half the lesson.
The story becomes even more concerning when one examines who is driving these changes.
Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF), a California-based nonprofit, openly promotes a national “Mission 2030” strategy to embed its preferred financial literacy framework in all fifty states. Texas is publicly celebrated as one of the organization’s victories.
The California campaign behind stripping free enterprise from personal financial literacy was championed by the same political establishment led by Gavin Newsom and Congressman Ro Khanna. Texas should not import California’s economic vision into Texas classrooms.
This is not an argument against personal financial literacy.
It is a question of whether Texas should allow a curriculum movement funded, developed, and promoted through California political and advocacy networks to reshape Texas standards while removing Texas-specific emphasis on free enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Texans should decide what Texas students learn.
The problem extends beyond standards.
Texas spent years debating House Bill 1605 and creating quality and suitability review processes for instructional materials. Parents, educators, and policymakers wanted transparency and accountability. The goal was simple: instructional materials used in Texas classrooms should be subject to meaningful review.
Yet the open educational resource pathway created by HB 27 effectively allows districts to bypass many of those safeguards. And who stands to benefit most from that loophole? Next Gen Personal Finance, the very organization whose national curriculum is driving these changes.
Because the materials are free, schools facing budget pressures have every incentive to adopt them. Because they are not subject to the same review process as state-approved instructional materials, they can be used without undergoing the same level of quality and suitability scrutiny. Because they are digital resources controlled by outside organizations, they can be updated, revised, and modified at any time without approval from the State Board of Education or Texas taxpayers.
Texas built a front gate with locks and security cameras through HB 1605 to ensure curriculum quality and transparency. HB 27 quietly swung the side gate wide open.
The market implications should concern conservatives as much as the curriculum implications.
Texas believes in competition.
Competition improves products. Competition lowers costs. Competition encourages innovation.
Yet the current model risks creating the opposite outcome.
When the same organization develops the standards, trains teachers, lobbies legislators, promotes legislation, and provides the curriculum itself, districts can become dependent on a single provider. Over time, that is not competition.
It is vendor capture.
A free product distributed nationwide can quickly become a de facto monopoly, especially when local districts lack the resources to develop alternatives. Once districts become dependent on one provider’s curriculum, updates, training, and instructional philosophy, meaningful competition disappears.
The State Board of Education still has time to act.
Board members should restore economics, entrepreneurship, and free enterprise principles to the Personal Financial Literacy standards. They should ensure that curriculum used in Texas classrooms is subject to meaningful quality and suitability review. And they should reaffirm a principle that has guided Texas education for generations:
Texas curriculum should be written in Texas, for Texas students, by Texans.
