Martinez: Maryland and D.C. should follow Virginia’s lead and require K-12 financial education for graduation

Across the country, there’s growing agreement on the need to teach financial literacy in our nation’s K-12 schools. Yet, if we want to truly set our children up for a lifetime of personal financial knowledge, we need to pass more state financial-literacy legislation that requires high-quality, stand-alone courses for graduation. That’s exactly what Virginia has done. In 2009, amid growing concern about the economy, it became one of the first states in the U.S. to require stand-alone classes in personal finance and economics to graduate, as part of the national W!SE Financial Literacy Certification program.