By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO
In Alaska, our public education system falsely claims to prepare our children for the future. But what is the future in our minds as adults, shaped by years of societal and financial experience, compared to the future imagined by Alaska’s K–12 students, the very future of our state?
But first, let’s discuss Alaska’s public education claim. The results by examining the last 2 or 3 decades tell a far different story.
Students routinely graduate without the ability to understand credit, manage money, or navigate basic financial decisions that shape their lives. This is not an accidental oversight; it is the product of a public education bureaucracy, backed by entrenched unions and public school districts, that have deliberately omitted real-world financial literacy from the curriculum.
My wife, a lifelong advocate for financial literacy, warns that the greatest disservice we are doing to our children, apart from Alaska’s academic failure, is the willful failure to teach them how to survive and thrive in the economy they are about to enter.
Of course, some may respond, “Isn’t that the parents’ job?” But if past generations in Alaska were never taught financial literacy in school, how can we reasonably expect today’s parents to teach something they themselves were never taught?
Alaska consistently ranks among the lowest-performing states in K–12 education. National data shows that Alaska’s students regularly place in the bottom five for reading, math, and graduation rates. A 2017 report by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program (ANSEP), led by Dr. Herb Schroeder and cited by the Anchorage Daily News, found that 74% of graduates from five major Alaska high schools—and more than 60% statewide. Yet even more troubling than these academic deficiencies is what our schools deliberately fail to teach: how to buy a home, rent an apartment, read a paycheck, build credit, avoid debt traps, and plan for a financially secure future.
Making the problem even worse, the University of Alaska formally adopted remedial and basic skills courses as official policy in 1996. By 2014, nearly half of all first-year students entering the university system were being placed into these remedial courses.
Ask the average high school senior what a credit score is or why it matters, you’ll likely get a blank stare. Dig a little deeper and ask them to solve basic math problems, and the answers may leave you genuinely alarmed.
Meanwhile, those same students will soon be signing student loans, car notes, apartment leases, and even real estate contracts; often without understanding the fine print. Some will apply for jobs that check credit scores, yet they’ve never been taught what credit is. With no personal finance education, Alaska’s youth are stepping into adulthood blindfolded.
Is it reasonable to infer that without such training, Alaskans may face higher rates of debt, foreclosure, and financial instability compared to students in states with robust financial education policies?
This omission is not due to a lack of available content or capable teachers. It is a deliberate prioritization by Alaska’s public education establishment and union interests, who continue to fight for higher base student allocations, expanded bureaucracy, and social programming, all while ignoring basic life-skills education. The same system that demands billions in public funding refuses to make a single semester of financial literacy a statewide graduation requirement. In doing so, it creates not only economic illiteracy but dependency.
In response to Alaska’s growing financial literacy crisis, lawmakers have introduced two key bills: SB 99 (2023) and SB 22 (2025). These measures would require high school students to complete a half-credit personal finance course covering essentials like credit, debt management, taxes, savings, loans, and fraud prevention as a graduation requirement. While SB 99 passed the Senate unanimously in 2023, neither bill has yet been signed into law as of mid‑2025, despite advancing through legislative committees.
The future outcome of this failure is already visible: increasing levels of personal debt among young Alaskans, greater reliance on welfare programs, delayed home ownership, and rising levels of anxiety and depression tied to financial instability.
Imagine your life with 30 problems in a month. Now realize that 27 of them are financial.
Now imagine you had the knowledge to solve every single one of those 27.
What would your life feel like with only three problems left and the freedom, time, and clarity to face them fully?
That’s the power of financial literacy: it doesn’t just change your money; it transforms your life.
We have created generations that can barely calculate interest on a loan yet is expected to support itself in the most expensive economy in state history.
Worse, this isn’t just poor planning. It’s a betrayal.
Our schools have become vehicles for ideological and political agendas while neglecting the most universally applicable knowledge any student could gain: how to manage one’s financial life. The unions and policymakers who control our education system have chosen not to prepare students for independence but to funnel them into systems of managed dependency. The result is a long-term erosion of Alaska’s economic freedom, personal responsibility, and civic health.
If we continue to graduate students without the basic tools of financial self-reliance, we are not educating. We are crippling. Alaska’s education system is failing not only in test scores but in purpose. The deliberate exclusion of personal finance and credit education is not a minor oversight. It is a systemic failure with life-altering consequences. As my wife has consistently argued, if children leave our schools knowing nothing about how to survive economically, then it doesn’t matter what grades they earned. The foundation of their future has already been sabotaged.
To restore purpose and accountability to Alaska’s schools, we must demand that financial literacy becomes a requirement, not an elective. Until that happens, no amount of funding or reform will matter. We will continue raising generations of young Alaskans who are academically underserved and financially unprepared, exactly as the education unions prefer. And the real cost of that failure will be paid not just by students, but by every Alaskan who believes in self-reliance, responsibility, and freedom.
Financial success serves as a foundation for broader social success, creating a positive feedback loop that enhances individual and community well-being. When individuals possess the knowledge and tools to manage money wisely through budgeting, saving, investing, and avoiding predatory debt they are more likely to achieve stability in housing, education, health care, and family life.
This financial stability, in turn, enables greater civic participation, educational attainment, and intergenerational opportunity. In essence, financial literacy is not just a money skill, it’s a life skill, and its absence can limit upward mobility and social cohesion. A well-informed citizenry equipped to make sound financial decisions contributes directly to stronger families, safer neighborhoods, and a more resilient society.
In Alaska, the future envisioned by experienced adults, grounded in economic self-reliance, civic responsibility, and long-term societal health, stands in stark contrast to the shallow, underdeveloped future prepared for K–12 students by a public education system that neglects financial literacy, practical skills, and meaningful preparation for adult life.
Dependency is the point of failed government education.
This was the entire purpose. The record is replete with 19th Century writings by the architects of public education explaining how they intended to create generations if illiterate fools. That Boomers persist in being ignorant of this, and somehow believing public education was once good and can be saved, is a famous demonstration of the success of the institution.
So, you are really saying that schools should take the place of incompetent parents and should teach materials not set out by the publicly elected school board; how does that fit within your patents rights platform, rofl?
Maybe think more, write less????
Nah.
Spot on article, Michael. I believe this system of dependency has been taught for over 45 or 50 years. We are seeing the second and third iteration of teaching, by students of the 70’s who are now teachers. It’s a process of brain washing that spans multiple generations.
I don’t recall being taught anything financial back in the 80’s and 90’s. Yet I and many other people are not dependent. So, perhaps not just a school issue. Parents need to step it up too.
Why do they need to know that booooring stuff, when they can be taught Exciting things like transgenderism and performing as drag queens??
This article should be circulated around our planet’s self-aledged “Democracies” Socialism doesn’t lead to wealth-creation. And democracies only work when enough money is around to enable such. Michael often writes incisive stuff; this being another. I reside is a future “failed State”: New Zealand…a place where decades of financially illiterate persons live off money that simply falls from heaven. Debt-traps are a function of many, if not current “Democracies”. The child-parent relationship doesn’t lead to entrepreneurial thought.
Seems increasingly obvious no Alaska education-industry official knows or cares what the hell they’re doing, so why not cut to the chase …what would it take to fire their asses right out the door, bring in recognized experts who do know what they’re doing, put them in charge for a couple of years, see how things go?
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Oh gosh, can’t do that …folks too busy down in the weeds, mired in minutiae and money, while another generation of kids get mutilated, brainwashed, groomed, sunk into functional illiteracy so badly even a third-rate college like UAA has to teach them how to read, write, and do sums?
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Remove and replace current education-industry heirarchy …can’t do that, some folks insist, because they’re cute and cuddly, look like us, would care so much more about kids if only they had more money, it’s not a racket, and anyway don’t we all believe in GOD*?
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So, who’s up for figuring out how to find, fix, and finish this racket and start over …with -none- of the current union-mangement team?
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*Government Operated Daycare
No where is this more apparent than in rural Alaska. Many communities have local Native corporations. They hire local graduates to complete jobs. Often the new employees don’t know how to even do basic math.
Absolutely agree taxpayer. Can’t read a tape measure I’ve witnessed it.
Could the fault be with those communities? The same communities with high crime rates? Maybe they just have a high concentration of people with bad values?
Teaching illiteracy to the masses takes time. Just like communism. Patience. Three or four generations of indoctrination usually covers it, unless the resistance can overpower it.
Kids should also be taught every thing about buying, fixing and maintaining cars!!!
And investing.
The rate of ignorance here, including both the author and commenters, is telling.
How is a school system supposed to teach children about financial management, investing, mortgages, etc., when the children live in a village? They live in a village where there is no bank, no atm, and a lot of the community members do not have driver’s licenses, or sometimes even have Alaska State IDs (until maybe over the most recent decades). There are no jobs that are not quasi or direct government jobs; there is no free market, small business economy. There is no housing development, and if the regional housing authority builds housing, eligibility is based on poverty level to live in those homes. How is an Alaska Statewide Educational System supposed to teach financial survival to students in communities where financial opportunities, infrastructure, and concepts do not even exist? If the schools want to start instilling financial savvy into the curriculum, start by educating the kids about the value of minerals that their families own as shareholders of Alaska Native Corporations. Show them maps of the land their families own; these are tangible and visual learning tools to engage our kids in sparking the concept of value, Alaska Native Civil Right. Private Land Owner rights. Right now, we have 44 million acres of private land that many of us at shareholders have never been educated about. How can they be familiar with, and drill down to the treasures beneath the blueberry picking and seasonal goose egg laying value, the fear-mongering education that we should not step foot on our tundra because the flora and fauna will not bounce back? All the while, kids are being spoon-fed fake cultural values that reinforce not being confrontational. If we want our children to be empowered, heard, and trusted, we need to teach them that confrontation is not uncomfortable or disrespectful. Confrontational conversations are necessary and display emotional intelligence and self-worth. With our children, it lets them practice self-care and value. The lessons being handed down generationally right now are hopelessness. They are valued less than the tundra; they are now told it isn’t safe for them to step on. What the entire FFFFF are we teaching – how much more are we supposed to make our kids feel so much less than tundra?
We are a culture that is used to having outside people make our decisions for us. The scariest thing our current and next few generations are going to deal with is learning what our monetary value is as private land owners, staving off outside influences that indoctrinate systemic values upon us, while monetizing their careers, financial success, and egos by speaking on our behalf. It is amazing to me to read the quotes of lawyers and others, interpreting our existence in a way that selfishly benefits their importance, and manufactures billable hours.
Some Alaska Native Corporation leaders co-sign the regional non-profit monetary valuation of our society. Which is that for the federal and state government to give us money, we need to be suffering.
The valuation that is not reported to us as shareholders on our annual financial reports is the value of minerals we own as the largest private indigenous landowners on earth. When our own Alaska Native leaders uplift our values to meet their personal needs, they define how our population and communities define ourselves. The Alaska Native non-profit leaders thrive individually on the demise of those that they lead. And they accept accolades and puff up with hero syndrome. While we continue to take pride in suffering like it’s a badge of honor.
I cannot believe this is it. I cannot believe this is all our ancestors hoped and prayed for us to experience.
You are indeed inspirational!
Excellent points! But villages do have some economies: village stores (often run by outsiders), gas stations. The increased use of the internet. It has to start small. I think if teachers were taught finances that would help too.
Alaskan villages have no economies. For an economy to exist, a fundamental ingredient must exist: production. That is, production of marketable wealth. In the early days, it was subsistence with no outside contact. Then, it was trapping, fishing and mining. Now, its just government hand-outs…. which make welfare enclaves rather than economies.
Concur.
This dependancy extends into areas where many turn to the govt for all sorts of well and nefarious intentions. Both parties then capitalize on this in order to retain power.
I’ve thought about this subject a lot over the years. First, I think parents should teach their kids about money and finance. On the other hand, there are a lot of parents (generally, old hippies) who know nothing about money and finance in the first place, so what they teach their children will be wrong.
Second, who says teachers know anything about money and finance? Do you want them teaching those subjects?
Third, the government already has done enough to screw up kid’s education. I’m referring to the Dept. of Education and all its failed programs, laws and corruption, the latter through nationwide teachers unions.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I still think it’s the parent’s responsibility to teach money and finance.
This article is off target. Alaska’s public education bureaucracy is failing on a basic level; as revealed in DOE academic performance scoring. High School graduates cannot construct a well-written sentence, let alone a paragraph or letter. They cannot even add up a column of 2-digit numbers; or multiply fractions. Yet Tavoliero contends we need to promote “financial education.” Young people need to learn how to crawl academically before they can walk academically.
Fact: the solution to public education in summed in one word: vouchers.