Why Stock Market Basics Aren’t Taught in Most High Schools (And What I’m Building for Teens)
Last Tuesday, my 16-year-old son Javi dumped his crumpled first paycheck from the neighborhood grocery store on the kitchen table, next to a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar and his half-finished algebra homework. He’d already set aside half for his used car savings, he said, but the rest was just sitting in his teen checking account earning 0.01% interest. “Where do people put money if they want it to grow more than that?” he asked. “Didn’t they teach you this stuff in school?”
I leaned against the counter and realized I couldn’t give him a straight, simple answer. I have a retirement account through my old teaching job, and I put a little money in each month, but I couldn’t clearly explain what I was actually invested in, or why it worked better than a savings account long term. My own high school personal finance class, required for graduation back in 2008, spent exactly 45 minutes on investing. The teacher passed out a vocabulary worksheet, told us to “max out your 401k match when you get a real job” and moved on. The rest of the semester was spent balancing paper checkbooks, a skill neither Javi nor I have ever actually used in real life, since everything is mobile banking now. No one explained what a share of stock was, how the market worked, or why regular people who don’t work on Wall Street would ever care. I left high school knowing how to prove triangles congruent and identify themes in To Kill a Mockingbird, but I had no idea how money grew beyond a basic savings account.
I spent three nights that week scrolling for resources Javi would actually engage with, and most of what I found was either useless or predatory. TikTok was full of 20-somethings claiming they turned $500 into $100k in six months day trading, selling $300 courses to teens who didn’t know better. The other end of the spectrum was dry college-level textbooks full of jargon that made Javi’s eyes glaze over after two pages. I tried to walk him through compound interest using numbers I found on a random blog, and he pulled out his calculator and pointed out my math was wrong within 30 seconds. That’s when I texted my old coworker Lila, who still teaches business ed at the public high school downtown, to ask why this stuff isn’t standard curriculum.
She said it’s not that teachers don’t want to cover it. Our state added investing as an optional unit to personal finance standards two years ago, but there’s no allocated budget for curriculum materials or teacher training. Most teachers in the department never learned about the stock market themselves when they were in school, so they don’t feel confident leading lessons on it. The school can’t afford the paid investing simulation platforms big suburban districts use, so most just skip the unit entirely. It’s not a deliberate choice to leave kids unprepared; it’s just another gap that falls through the cracks when budgets are tight and accountability rules prioritize topics that show up on end-of-year exams. I saw that all the time when I was teaching. If it’s not tested, and there’s no money to teach it, it doesn’t get taught.
I left teaching five years ago when my younger daughter was born, but I still build small educational websites for local tutoring companies on the side. I figured if I couldn’t find something that worked for Javi, I could build it myself. I didn’t set out to make some fancy, comprehensive finance program. I just wanted something that met teens where they are: no jargon, no scams, no assumption that anyone using it already has thousands of dollars to invest.
The first set of lessons starts with brands teens actually interact with every day, not hypothetical Fortune 500 companies they’ve never heard of. We open with Nike, Starbucks, the skincare brand half the girls in Javi’s grade use, and the snack company that makes his favorite chips. The first lesson just explains what a share is: if you buy one share of Nike, you own a tiny sliver of the company, and if the company does well over time, your share is worth more. No fancy formulas right off the bat. Users get a simulated $1,000 to build a small portfolio, so they can follow along with real market movements without risking any actual money. Each lesson is 10 minutes long, no long homework assignments, just one quick check to make sure the concept stuck. I also added short conversation prompts for parents at the end of each lesson, because I know most caregivers aren’t investing experts either. You don’t have to know all the answers to talk about this stuff with your kid.
For what it’s worth, you don’t need a whole platform to start these conversations at home, either. I started small with Javi months before I started building this, just pointing out brands when we ran errands. When we were picking up new sneakers for cross country back in August, I said, “Nike is a public company, that means regular people can buy tiny pieces of it if they want.” That’s it, no big lecture. When we see a day trading TikTok pop up on his For You Page, I don’t panic and ban the app. I just pause it and say, “That guy makes money selling courses, not from trading. Most people who try to buy and sell stocks every day lose money over time. This isn’t how regular people save for a car or a house.” If he asks a question I don’t know the answer to, I don’t make something up. I just say, “Good question, I don’t know that for sure. Let’s look it up together on the SEC’s free investor education site.” It takes two minutes, and it models that it’s okay to not have all the answers, as long as you find them from a reliable source.
I tested the first three units with Javi and three of his friends around our dining table last week, with a couple of pepperoni pizzas to keep them engaged. It was messy, not perfect. One kid who collects sneakers immediately put half his fake money into Nike and Adidas, and said it felt weird to “own part” of a brand he’d been buying from for years. Another kid asked why we didn’t have a whole unit on crypto, and I admitted I was still working on that one, because I wanted to make sure I explained the risks clearly without hyping it or dismissing it outright. Javi said the lessons were way less boring than the health videos they have to watch for graduation, which is about the highest compliment a teen can give. The biggest feedback I got was that they wanted more real examples of regular people, not millionaires, using investing to save for ordinary goals: a down payment on a car, a wedding, retirement. That’s the stuff no one talks about, right? All the popular content makes it seem like investing is only for rich people who want to get richer faster.
Right now, the full 8-week program is almost done, and I’m looking for 50 testers to work through it for free. That can be individual families with teens 14 to 18, or high school teachers who want to test it with a whole class. There’s no cost, no sales pitch at the end, I just ask that you spend 10 minutes filling out a short feedback survey after each unit, so I can fix what doesn’t work and add what’s missing. The sign up link is at the bottom of this post, and I’ll take the first 50 people who sign up by the end of the month.
I still don’t consider myself an investing expert, by any stretch. Last week I emailed my own financial advisor a question about index funds that I probably should have asked 10 years ago, when I first opened my retirement account. This platform isn’t going to fix the big gaps in public school curricula, and it’s not going to turn every teen into a Wall Street whiz. That was never the point. Javi already put $200 of his last paycheck into a custodial Roth IRA last week, picked a low-cost index fund all on his own, and I didn’t have to nag him once. But I still stay up some nights wondering if I’m simplifying too much, if I’m leaving out risks that will matter down the line, if there’s a better way to explain this stuff that I haven’t thought of yet. It’s still a work in progress. Most things we build for our kids are, I think.
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