250 voices.
250 founding educators.
$250.

Most young people are living inside one of the most consequential arguments in American history — who holds economic power, and to whom is it accountable — without the language to name what they're experiencing. Economic Democracy was built to give them that language.

Built by a teacher who spent fourteen years in South Bronx and California classrooms, then another decade building economic infrastructure for communities the mainstream economy had decided to leave out. Not a publisher. Not a think tank. Not a foundation with an agenda.

The core curriculum is done. The website is live. 250 profiles are written. Teacher guides are free. Monthly professional development begins June 2026. Now it's time to build the community of educators that carries this into classrooms — and helps shape what comes next.

That community starts with 250 founding educators. 2026 is the learning year. What founders experience in classrooms will directly determine the 2027 model — how this grows, what gets added, and how the curriculum reaches younger grades. Pre-order now and help determine what this becomes.

$250 gets you the complete curriculum as it stands — plus everything added through December 2026. Delivered as organized, print-ready PDFs via Gumroad download. Buy once, print for every class, every year. No upsells. No "that unit costs extra."

Seven sessions. Monthly. All recorded. Come to every session, some of them, or none — the curriculum is yours regardless. What we learn together in 2026 builds the model for 2027 and beyond.

I left the classroom 12 years ago because I wanted to understand how the economy really works.

At the time, I had already spent more than a decade teaching history in the public high schools of New York City and California. My children were young. My wife was a social worker. And like so many families in the Bay Area, we were being pushed from place to place by rising rents and a growing sense that hard work alone was no longer enough. I wanted more economic agency and a brighter future for my family.

That journey eventually led me to become a serial entrepreneur, but at heart I am always a teacher. Now I want to return to the classroom, not as your local history teacher, but with a framework to understand our nation — something I wish I had been able to teach twenty years ago: Economic Democracy. A new U.S. History, Government, and Economics curriculum for grades 11–12.

For too long, we have taught young people to sort the world across a flat left-right spectrum, while missing deeper questions:

• Where should power sit?
• Who decides?
• Who benefits?
• And to whom is power accountable?

Economic Democracy offers a different framework. It maps American history as an ongoing argument about public vs. private power, democratic accountability vs. elite control. It brings together 250 voices, one for every year of the American experiment, from 1776 to 2026.

This is not a curriculum that tells students what to think. It is a curriculum that asks them to think more rigorously, write more honestly, and engage more seriously with the tensions at the center of our national life.

We are living through a low point in American democracy. Economic anxiety is high. Trust is low. Many people feel stuck, disoriented, and alienated from one another.

But we have been here before.

American history is not the story of a nation that avoided crisis. It is the story of a nation that has repeatedly confronted crisis, argued its way through it, and imperfectly reinvented itself. That is the spirit behind this project.

If you are a teacher, school leader, parent, or simply someone who cares about democratic renewal, I hope you will take a look. And if you know a great high school teacher who might want to pilot this for the 2026–2027 school year, please share it with them.

— Alfredo Mathew III