Who says kids don't know anything about money?This week the Treasury Department revealed the winners of the National Financial Literacy Challenge, a voluntary Web-based contest open to high school students across the country that allows them to demonstrate their knowledge of important personal finance concepts.
Students with perfect scores received a college scholarship from the Charles Schwab Foundation, with an additional financial contribution going to each winning student's school. Students who scored in the top 25th percentile of the roughly 75,000 participants received certificates of recognition and 362 students earned the National Financial Literacy Award medal for demonstrating exceptional levels of financial literacy with perfect or near-perfect scores.
The Challenge's 35 questions are correlated to the National Standards in K-12 Personal Finance Education published by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Finance in 2007. The questions were developed in consultation with economists, Junior Achievement USA, the National Council on Economic Education, the National Endowment for financial Education and the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.
"The challenge to parents, teachers, school administrators and policy makers across the country is to get effective personal finance education into every classroom, for every student," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Education Dan Iannicola, Jr. "We owe it to the members of the next generation to properly equip them for the financial choices and challenges they will face."
