When the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing the new AP® Business with Personal Finance course earlier this month (Aug. 2026), it included a four-question sample quiz built around one 26-year-old's budget and expenses. The strongest signal may not have been the article itself; it was the 300-plus reader comments underneath it.[1] Many of these readers argued over whether the quiz's four answer choices captured the scenario's real problem (the hypothetical adult's average expenses exceeding average income). But the consensus among commenters was that personal finance and business concepts should be priority subjects in school.
A national audience, skewing older and financially literate, spent real effort picking apart sample questions for a class most of them will never take. That's a group that is invested in quality education and believes the financial literacy problem among teens and young adults is real.
The harder question the quick article didn't raise is the teachers. In the most recent year federal data covers, 2020-21, 11% of public high school teachers had career and technical education, the umbrella field that encompasses business and other technical career subjects.[2] That shortage isn't just a pandemic-year stat: 33 states reported a career and technical education teacher shortage to the federal government in the 2024-25 school year, and also was one of the deepest in shortage positions, which can often be filled by temporary or out-of-field teachers.[3] CTE teachers were often the newest to the profession of any subject area measured in 2020-21. 10% had less than three years of experience, compared with 5% to 7% for English, math, science, and foreign-language teachers.[2]
Business education is one of the largest subjects inside that CTE umbrella, and a growing one. In 2019, 21% of high school graduates had taken at least one business and marketing course, trailing only information technology and human services among the 12 CTE fields NCES tracks nationally.[2] At the postsecondary level, the number of business and marketing certificates awarded grew 55% in a decade, from about 68,000 to about 105,500 a year, one of the fastest-growing credential fields NCES tracks.[2] NCES's own public tables don't break CTE teachers out by specific field, so no business-teacher headcount exists to set against that growth. Retention isn't much of a cushion either: just 84% of public school teachers stayed at the same school year over year in 2021-22.[4]
A new standard can do something real: give business-and-personal-finance courses a shared definition of what topics to cover, replacing the current state-by-state patchwork. Staffing sits outside what a standard can touch. Individuals qualified to run these courses don't appear because of a course description, and a shared standard says nothing about whether students and parents get a well-taught course or a thin one, depending on which school they attend. That's the actual gap the financially literate WSJ readers were reacting to. FinBizify exists because business and personal-finance education shouldn't depend on which school a student happens to attend or whether that school found and kept the right teacher: content built once, delivered directly to a teen, not waiting on a staffing solution few have solved.
Sources
Elyse Goncalves and Veronica Dagher, "Could You Beat a High-Schooler on the New AP Personal-Finance Test?" The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 22, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/could-you-beat-a-high-schooler-on-the-new-ap-personal-finance-test-64b05f92
"Career and Technical Education in the United States," Condition of Education 2024 (Spotlight), National Center for Education Statistics, drawing on the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey, the 2019 NAEP High School Transcript Study, and 2021-22 IPEDS completions data. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/2024/tob_508c.pdf
"Teacher Shortages by Subjects Across States," Fact Sheet, Learning Policy Institute, July 2025, analysis of Teacher Shortage Area data for the 2024-25 school year provided by the U.S. Department of Education. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/teacher-shortages-subjects-across-states-factsheet
"Teacher Turnover: Stayers, Movers, and Leavers," Condition of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/slc/teacher-turnover
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FinBizify is building business and personal finance lessons teenagers actually finish, taught through real companies and real dollar amounts.