On a sunny afternoon in Brooklyn, a group of middle schoolers faced a problem: they had a product, a price, and a customer base, but they were losing to the table across the room. Max Lalezarian’s team had started a lemonade stand. Ziv Gedzelman’s had gone with candy– higher volume, lower margin– and was moving more units but making less money. By the end of the session, both groups understood something that most American adults couldn’t tell you: the difference between revenue and profit.
Neither Lalezarian nor Gedzelman is a teacher. Both are in high school.
The United States ranks outside the top ten in global financial literacy: a striking figure for the country that runs the world’s largest economy. Where financial education does exist in schools, it tends to come as a lecture: abstract principles on a whiteboard, disconnected from anything a teenager might actually care about and even more so, a middle schooler. Most students who do get some form of financial education forget it before the semester ends.
Lalezarian and Gedzelman recognized this issue and decided to act. Their program, Simplifi Learning, runs hands-on finance workshops for middle schoolers and teenagers across New York. The lessons don’t resemble stagnant lectures– a model the founders quickly found ineffective– but instead focus on interactive exercises rooted in real-world situations.
Simplifi didn’t start cleanly. In freshman year, the young founders cold-emailed more than ten schools with detailed proposals. Not one person wrote back. The breakthrough came when they stopped trying to build an audience and started working through organizations that already had– one a basketball program here, a charter school there– tailoring every lesson to the students in front of them.
That instinct to meet students where they are runs through everything they do. With their basketball program, every example is grounded in businesses and figures the students already know and are excited about.
“If you’re talking about some abstract economic principle without giving real, tangible examples,” Gedzelman said, “it’s very difficult to understand.”
Their philosophy breaks the conventional reform playbook. When most policymakers talk about improving financial literacy, they immediately think to teach applications right away: specific how-tos and ready-made formulas. Lalezarian and Gedzelman think that’s backwards. They argue foundations first– principles and economic understanding– before any real-world application.
“People shouldn’t just go into the financial industry to make money,” Max said. “We’re trying to teach that it can be used for good.”
Now expanding their instructor network and developing a student entrepreneurship competition– one that asks participants to build businesses solving real problems in their communities– Simplifi Learning is evolving from a small initiative into a scalable model for financial education.
Two high schoolers with unanswered emails and a mission are doing what decades of education policy could not: teaching a generation of young Americans how money works, and demonstrating that the path to a financially literate nation may run not through legislatures or school boards, but through the ambitions of young people who simply decided not to wait. To learn more about Simplifi Learning, visit their website: https://www.simplifilearning.org/