Before you read this article, the author makes a claim that “only 26% of eighth-grade students in the United States are proficient in basic math.”
I did some digging behind this stat (since it sounds a bit wild) but it’s confirmed by the NAEP state achievement-level results from 2022 – “In 2022, the percentage of eighth-grade public school students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level in mathematics was 26 percent nationally.”
Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy [Anand Sanwal] – “What makes financial decisions hard isn’t the math.
Most personal finance math is basic arithmetic – the same arithmetic that most of our students currently struggle with. The hard part is everything else: impulse control, peer pressure, status anxiety, and the fundamental uncertainty of the future.”