Before anything else
4 of the 10 years
are actually
written.
4 of the 10 rungs below exist as finished books a teacher could photocopy tomorrow. The other 6 are a plan. The ladder labels every rung, so you never have to guess which one you are reading.
No student has completed this pathway, because no student could have. It is published now because the shape of it is the thing worth arguing with, not because it is done.
Where the idea comes from
Two years is not
how long it takes
to understand it.
This is Cindy’s account, and it is the reason the organization is built the way it is. She had already run a business, profitably, for years. She went through the two years anyway, and it was only inside them that the way a business actually thinks became something she held rather than something she improvised.
Her read on that is not that the material is hard. It is that two years is a compression schedule, priced and paced for adults who are already fluent in the vocabulary, and that the compression is doing a lot of the damage. Spread the same ideas over the years a child is in school anyway and there is no schedule to keep up with. There is one idea a week, met again the next year in a slightly larger form.
If only I had known all of this at a much younger age.
Cindy HaShe graduated at the top of her class at every stage, and says plainly that this was effort rather than talent. That matters here for one reason: the pathway is built for students willing to work, and she is not asking them for anything she did not do.
The ladder
One idea a year,
for ten years.
Each row is a school year, what a student does in it, and the graduate course that eventually formalizes the same idea. That last column is our own mapping. It is an argument about the order things can be learned in, not a claim of equivalence, and certainly not a claim of credit.
Grade 3
PublishedThe Choosing Year
There is enough for one of two things, and choosing one means not having the other. Price as a number somebody chose, a ledger kept for a month, saving that takes longer than expected, and a first look at what a home pays for.
36 weeks, written in full, free to download today. Nothing is sold in it: that is Grade 4. This year is about the student's own money.
Grade 4
PublishedThe Venture Year
One student, one product, one market day, whole dollars. Find a problem worth solving, design something that fixes it, work out what it costs to make and what to charge, sell it, then work out honestly whether it made a profit.
36 weeks, written in full, free to download today.
Grade 5
PublishedThe Numbers Year
A team of two or three with named roles and a profit split written as fractions. A product line of three with one deliberately cut. Fixed and variable costs pulled apart. A forecast, two selling sessions, one deliberate change between them, and the honest answer to whether the change did anything.
36 weeks, written in full, free to download today. The third trimester is a controlled experiment rather than an event.
Grade 6
PublishedThe Market Year
A second seller appears. Pricing against somebody else’s price, substitutes, market share, and a response round where every team sees every other team’s numbers and moves at the same time.
36 weeks, written in full, free to download today. Written before the first cohort ran, so the first revision after a pilot will be substantial.
Grade 7
PlannedCash against profit. Why a sale and money in hand are different events, what inventory ties up, and how a profitable business runs out of money.
Planned as content, not as a book. Print is the wrong medium for this age, so nothing is written for it until there is a digital form to deliver it in. See DELIVERY.middleGrades.
Grade 8
PlannedWhat capital costs. Interest, simple and compound, the arithmetic of a loan, and the reason the same purchase costs two people different amounts.
Planned as content, not as a book. Print is the wrong medium for this age, so nothing is written for it until there is a digital form to deliver it in. See DELIVERY.middleGrades.
Grade 9
DesignedReading a business from its numbers. Three statements, unit economics, break-even, and the questions to ask when the numbers and the story disagree.
Covered in part by the Executives Track, the four-summer cohort. The full year is not written.
Grade 10
DesignedHow a group of people gets work done. Roles, delegation, incentives, and what happens to a plan when the people executing it are not the people who wrote it.
Covered in part by the Leadership track. The full year is not written.
Grade 11
PlannedWhere an advantage comes from and how a deal gets structured. What to ask for, what to concede, and how to tell the difference between a negotiation and an argument.
Grade 12
PlannedOwnership. Equity, dilution, risk, what it means to hold a share of something other people work at, and what is owed to them.
The written rungs are the bottom 4, Grades 3 through 6, because that is where the work started rather than because they matter most. The elementary band runs continuously now. Everything from Grade 7 up is the furthest out and the most likely to change, and the thing most likely to change it is one teacher finishing a year and telling us what actually happened.
Say it before someone else does
This is not
an MBA.
There is a version of this page that ends with a student graduating high school having quietly earned a business degree. It is a better sentence than it is a true one, so here is the true one instead.
- This is not a degree, and finishing it confers no credential of any kind.
- It carries no academic credit, no college credit, and no articulation agreement with any institution.
- Young Innovators for Change is not an accredited school and does not award diplomas, certificates or transcripts.
- It is not a substitute for a graduate business education, and a student who completes it and later wants an MBA should go and get one.
- No student has completed this pathway. Four of its ten years are written, and nobody has run any of them start to finish in a classroom yet.
What a student would have instead, if all ten years get written and they take them, is ten years of practice with the ideas a business degree covers, met early enough to change what they can see. That is a smaller claim, and it is the one we can defend.
How a student gets in
Nobody can be
made to want this.
The pathway is offered, never required, and that is a design constraint rather than a courtesy. A student who does not want it will not absorb it, and a student who does should not have to get past us to reach it.
The honest risk in an opt-in design is that the students who opt in are the ones who were already going to be fine, and that the program ends up widening the gap it was built to close. We do not have an answer to that yet. It is written down as a stated risk on the evidence page, and it is one of the first things a pilot would need to measure.
The research this leans on
Including the paper
that says we are
probably wrong.
None of the work below evaluates our curriculum. It is the published literature on spacing, on childhood financial development, on entrepreneurship education and on motivation, and it is what the design is reasoning from. Each entry says what the study found and where its support for us runs out. The field is contested, and the strongest single result in it cuts against the whole category.
The Process of Education
Jerome S. Bruner (1960). Harvard University Press.
Sets out the spiral curriculum: "A curriculum as it develops should revisit these basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them" (p. 13), on the hypothesis that "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development" (p. 33).
What it does and does not supportThis is the structural argument for the pathway, and it is a 1960 theoretical position rather than an experimental result. It says a spiral is a coherent way to build a curriculum. It does not say ours is any good.
Read the sourceBuilding Blocks to Help Youth Achieve Financial Capability: A New Model and Recommendations
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2016). U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Places executive function in early childhood (ages 3 to 5), financial habits and norms in middle childhood (ages 6 to 12), and explicit financial knowledge and decision-making skills in adolescence and young adulthood (ages 13 to 21).
What it does and does not supportThis is the developmental case for starting in elementary school and saving the formal reasoning for the upper grades, which is how the ladder is ordered. It is a synthesis and a model, not a trial of any program.
Read the sourceDistributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis
Nicholas J. Cepeda, Harold Pashler, Edward Vul, John T. Wixted and Doug Rohrer (2006). Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 354 to 380.
839 assessments across 317 experiments in 184 articles. Spaced study beats massed study, and the gap that produces the best retention grows as the delay before the test grows.
What it does and does not supportThe reason the pathway is ten years of one lesson a week rather than a course. Caveat worth stating: this literature is mostly verbal recall in laboratory settings, not business concepts in classrooms over a decade.
Read the sourceImproving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan and Daniel T. Willingham (2013). Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1), 4 to 58.
Reviews ten study techniques against the evidence and rates only two as high utility across materials, learners and settings. Distributed practice is one of them.
What it does and does not supportIndependent confirmation that spacing is among the few instructional choices with broad support. It says nothing about the content we chose to space.
Read the sourceArgues against us
Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors
Daniel Fernandes, John G. Lynch Jr. and Richard G. Netemeyer (2014). Management Science 60(8), 1861 to 1883.
A meta-analysis of 168 papers covering 201 studies. Interventions to improve financial literacy explained 0.1 percent of the variance in the financial behaviors studied, effects decayed over time, and even large interventions with many hours of instruction had negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more afterward. Effects were weaker in low-income samples.
What it does and does not supportThe strongest published argument against the thing we are building, and the reason it is designed the way it is. If a one-time course fades within two years, the answer is not a better one-time course. Whether spreading the same material across ten years defeats that decay is untested, including by us. The finding of weaker effects in low-income samples lands directly on our intended schools and we have no answer to it yet.
Read the sourceFinancial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors
Tim Kaiser, Annamaria Lusardi, Lukas Menkhoff and Carly Urban (2022). Journal of Financial Economics 145(2), 255 to 272.
A meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with over 160,000 participants. Financial education has positive causal effects on financial knowledge and on downstream behavior, comparable in size to educational interventions in other domains and at least three times the average effect found in earlier work.
What it does and does not supportThe counterweight to the paper above, and more recent, but it is a different evidence base: randomized trials rather than the wider set. Taken together the two say the field is contested, which is the accurate summary and the one we would rather publish than a tidier one.
Read the sourceState Mandated Financial Education and the Credit Behavior of Young Adults
Alexandra Brown, J. Michael Collins, Maximilian Schmeiser and Carly Urban (2014). Federal Reserve Board, Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2014-68.
Young people in school after Georgia, Idaho and Texas introduced a financial education requirement in 2007 had higher relative credit scores and lower relative delinquency rates than comparable young people in states without one.
What it does and does not supportEvidence that school-delivered money instruction can show up years later in behavior that costs real money. It is a state policy study, not a curriculum study, and it cannot tell you which parts of the instruction did the work.
Read the sourceSpillover Effects of Financial Education: The Impact of School-Based Programs on Parents
Veronica Frisancho (2023). Journal of Financial Literacy and Wellbeing 1(1), 138 to 153.
A randomized controlled trial across 300 public high schools in Peru. Teachers delivered 16 to 32 hours of financial education inside an existing class to nearly 20,000 students in grades 9 to 11. Three years later the study matched 11,090 parents to credit bureau records. Average effects across all parents were small, but in low socioeconomic status households the probability of default fell 26 percent and credit scores rose 5 percent, while high status households showed almost no change. Effects were stronger for the parents of daughters.
What it does and does not supportThe only study in this list that tests whether what a child learns reaches the household, which is half the reason this organization exists. It supports that claim specifically for lower income families, which is the population we are built for and the one Fernandes found the weakest effects in. The limits are real and worth stating first: Peru rather than California, grades 9 to 11 rather than elementary, and a short course rather than a ten-year pathway. It says the mechanism exists. It does not say ours will produce it.
Read the sourceThe Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in High School on Long-Term Entrepreneurial Performance
Niklas Elert, Fredrik W. Andersson and Karl Wennberg (2015). Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 111, 209 to 223.
Swedish students who took part in the Junior Achievement Company Program in high school, followed for up to 16 years, were more likely to start a firm and earned higher entrepreneurial incomes than matched peers. There was no effect on firm survival.
What it does and does not supportThe closest thing in the literature to a long-run test of running a small business as schoolwork, and the null result on survival is the part worth sitting with. It is a matched observational study, not a randomized trial, and it studies teenagers rather than nine-year-olds.
Read the sourceSelf-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci (2000). American Psychologist 55(1), 68 to 78.
Sustained motivation depends on three conditions being met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Interest that is chosen holds; interest that is imposed tends not to.
What it does and does not supportThe research basis for making the pathway opt-in rather than required. It supports the design choice. It does not promise that the students who opt in will be the ones who most needed it, which is a real risk and is on the evidence page.
Read the sourceIf you know this literature better than we do and think we have characterized a paper wrongly, we would rather hear it than not. The citation list lives in one file in the site’s source, the same file every other factual claim on this site is held in.
Ten years starts with one.
4 of the 10 years are finished and free to download. The fastest way to find out whether any of this holds up is for one teacher to run one of them.