HB 27 requires Texas high school students to complete a dedicated, one-half credit personal finance literacy course before graduation:
- Minimum 18 weeks of instruction
- Focused on real-world financial skills
- Not embedded within another course
The goal: ensure every student graduates with a practical understanding of how money works.
Section 113.127 would allow the College Board’s AP Business with Personal Finance course to be the sole course automatically counted toward the state’s new financial literacy requirement. This would take effect before the state’s standards for the HB 27 course are even established.
HB 27 explicitly allows AP courses to qualify, but only after a formal review confirms they meet Texas standards. The College Board’s AP course may not meet those standards — it has already failed to meet standards in five other states. The concern is not AP coursework – it is pre-approving a single course before standards are even set and without independent and public evaluation.
Five states (Wisconsin, Utah, Kentucky, Florida and California) have rejected the College Board’s AP course as not meeting personal finance education graduation requirements similar to those in Texas.
Texas high schoolers only get one chance to take a personal finance course before graduation. If the state approves a substitute course before ensuring it meets the state’s personal financial literacy standards, students could miss out on the full financial literacy education that Texas lawmakers intended.
A rigorous standalone personal finance course delivers an estimated $98,000 in lifetime financial benefit per student (Tyton Partners). In addition, a standalone personal finance course would require no fees, no textbook costs, and no professional development fees for teachers, as opposed to the College Board’s AP Business with Personal Finance course.