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.
