CONTENTS

Index

Prologue

Summary

Commercial Pressures on Kids at School

Evaluations

How Great a Problem?

Recommendations

Guidelines for Evaluating SOCAP & IOCU Materials

Ratings Charts

Channel One vs. CNN

"Schoolchildren are for sale to the highest bidder. This was true in 1979, when my book Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools was published, and the situation is even more threatening today. Today's corporations are slicker, more sophisticated in their marketing strategies than they were a decade ago. Intrusions into the classroom by business interests continue unabated --some blatantly promotional, others more subtly biased." --Sheila Harty, Educational Leadership36

Are the many promotional messages and commercial influences reaching kids at school undermining the integrity of education, or are they an acceptable price to pay for an infusion of materials, programs, and equipment into financially hard-pressed classrooms? In this section, we look at arguments for and against commercialism in the schools.

Most of the arguments in support of in-school commercialism rest on schools' financial needs and assumptions that administrators and teachers can counteract any adverse affects of commercialism in the school environment or in classroom materials and programs. No one is saying in-school commercialism per se is desirable; rather, they're looking at it as a means to an end. We believe the debate would not exist, in fact, if schools weren't chronically underfunded and forced to accept help from companies willing to give it.

Defense arguments include the following:

Sponsored programs and outright advertising provide schools with desperately needed materials and financial support.
The business interests argue that in-school advertising and sponsored educational materials and programs augment tight school budgets, either by saving schools money or giving them income. According to Edward Jackson of Youthtalk Advertising Agency, provider of in-school wallboard advertising, many schools wholeheartedly welcome the helping hand. "I've had principals cry when I presented them their check at the end of the year," he told us.

Commercialism is everywhere.
Students see commercial messages everywhere. There's no reason to believe kids are unduly influenced by the additional ads they see in school.

Not all teachers view sponsored materials as uniquely "commercial." One of the teachers we spoke with on-line observed that everything is commercial: "...It doesn't take the words 'provided by Exxon' for material to be one-sided nor should we assume that because something is sponsored by a corporate donor it is automatically bad."

Teachers are capable of evaluating materials for commercialism and bias, and using the materials in an appropriate way.
Defenders feel that teachers and students are capable of recognizing and working around any bias in commercially-sponsored materials, maintaining that they can and do evaluate incoming materials and serve as gatekeepers against excessive commercialism in the classroom.

Some see these materials as opportunities to teach media literacy.
Some even welcome sponsored materials as grist for classroom analysis and investigation. They argue that even the most biased materials can be used --if not for what the materials purport to teach then for the opportunity to show propaganda in action.

Business has unique information and resources that can improve students' education.
Some supporters argue that corporate-sponsored materials offer information not typically available in schools. They see no problem with such materials, especially if the sponsoring company produced materials related to its area of expertise.

The problems with sponsored materials are exaggerated.
Some teachers who responded to our on-line poll found the handouts from corporate or organizational sponsors offered them a way to vary their lesson plans and give kids "hands-on" materials to work with. One middle school teacher in Stamford, Connecticut, said: "If it's free (and good) it's for me! Great, glossy, up to date, motivating materials...are a heck of a lot better than the 1966 textbooks that many teachers are refurbishing to pass out each September."

THE CASE AGAINST COMMERCIALISM IN SCHOOLS

The case against commercialism in schools gets to the heart of what education should and shouldn't be --the school environment, what lessons teachers should teach, and who should set the agenda. The single criterion driving these decisions should be what's best for students, not what's glossiest or most lucrative for schools.

The main arguments against commercialism in the school environment and in classroom materials --why schools should be ad-free zones-- mirror some of the arguments presented against Channel One.

Cedes control to people outside education.
One of the complaints against Channel One is that outsiders dictate to schools what programs to show kids and how often. Teachers and administrators should set the educational agenda, not outside commercial interests. (A related problem is who should produce the educational materials schools use.) Educators with no agenda other than meeting curriculum needs and educating kids should develop and/or control the curriculum materials used in classrooms. Materials should have a legitimate education need, not a commercial motive.

Compromises the integrity of education.
Programs or materials produced with marketing objectives in mind are propaganda for either a product or an idea. Such materials ultimately corrupt curricula and compromise schools' efforts to educate and empower students. Getting kids to buy products, feel good about a corporation, or adopt the viewpoints of an industry on an important issue is not the purpose of education. One teacher from Alaska who we spoke with on-line agrees that "sponsorship by corporate America comes with a definite price tag." He told of receiving "two cases of a beautifully designed mini-handbook on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights" from Phillip Morris Company and putting the books in his closet because the company's logo appeared on the front and back covers.

Selling or providing access for commercial purposes to kids while they are captives in the classroom is a perversion of education.

Ads in school and in school materials carry the weight of an endorsement.
Ads in school materials and programs lend an implied endorsement to the sponsor or its product, all the more damaging because it affects a captive audience that has been asked to trust what the teacher says and does. This power is not lost on the in-school marketer: "There is an implied endorsement from a trusted institution," says Steven Kaplan, president of Sampling Corporation of America (SCA), which distributed 110 million product samples to 76,000 schools nationwide in 1994.37

Promotional sponsored education materials blur the line between education and propaganda and lead to distorted lessons.
Many commercial efforts masquerade as educational materials or activities while promoting self-interested, incomplete, or discriminatory points of view. Sponsored materials often fail to present opposing points of view, to reveal who financed studies that support their viewpoints, to acknowledge the sponsor's own financial interest in the point of view expressed, or to disclose conditions and information that affect the accuracy of what they teach. Such materials basically teach opinion as if it were fact. Similar to the confusion between the infomercial and the independent report in some magazines, this blurs the line between fact and propaganda. The result is a distorted picture of the problems, choices, and trade-offs inherent in the issues these materials cover.

Often such materials contradict other lessons kids learn in school. Colas, potato chips, fast-foods, candy are all foods that students should consume only in moderation. By marketing such products to kids in school, there's the possibility that students will get the wrong idea --that they're okay after all.

An example cited recently by Consumers Association of Australia noted that: "A teacher may not be sufficiently versed in nutrition to assess a company's nutrition information. Yet its products may be in direct conflict with good nutrition. Even if it is obvious to teachers and parents that a company's products are not for frequent eating, this is difficult to explain to children who are being encouraged to join in fund raising nights involving buying a company's products, or who come home with sports uniforms carrying its logo." 38

Sponsored programs and materials often bypass review processes intended to safeguard students from biased or otherwise flawed materials.
Materials sent free to teachers often come into schools through the back door, rather than through the formal curriculum review boards that evaluate potential learning materials for, among other things, balanced point of view and excessive commercial content. Business-sponsored incentive, label collection, or other programs also fall outside the purview of review boards.

The idea that teachers can serve as the gatekeepers against the biased messages often found in sponsored materials is naive.
Despite the fact that many educators believe that teachers are capable of evaluating materials for commercialism and bias, according to Alex Molnar, Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, most teachers haven't been taught how to do this --or don't even see the need to. And unless a teacher is an expert in a topic, evaluating sponsored materials is not necessarily easy. In evaluating these materials, we had to draw on CU's ecology, economics, and nutrition experts.

Educators' beliefs that that they can handle and defuse promotional content of commercial programs is equally questionable. Saying that teachers can defuse the advertising messages in sponsored materials and programs and salvage something worthwhile from them is like using textbooks with gender or ethnic discrimination, and claiming it's a good way to teach about diversity.

In-school marketing contributes to the din of commercialism targeted at kids, and promotes materialism.
In 1990, 30,000 television commercials were aimed at children in the home. Add to this a host of kids' clubs, catalogs, comic book and magazine ads, and a range of ads and promotional materials in the schools, and our children may be the most targeted group of Americans that has ever existed. The message that comes through this din is pro-consumption. But creating such a buy-me-that climate among children who are already burdened with too many ads to buy things they can't afford is obviously unfair.

Advertising for everything from fast food to sneakers can come between students and their families: Pressuring parents to buy certain products often leads to conflict. Regardless of one's personal position on materialism and consumption, schools should be preparing students to make their own choices, not influencing them to follow the path advocated by marketers.

The idea that kids aren't influenced by in-school advertising because it's everywhere reflects a naivete about the nature of advertising.
Even adults are affected by advertising. If they weren't, advertisers wouldn't be in business. Students are even less discerning and therefore more easily influenced than adults.

The idea that school-business partnerships should have a commercial pay-back aspect is unethical.
Rather than sell students' minds to business in exchange for free programs or technology, schools need to pressure the corporate sector to live up to its non-marketing responsibility to support schools, the institutions that are preparing the corporations' future workers, future consumers, and future citizens.

Any one of these factors alone poses a threat to the independence and integrity of the educational system. And left unchecked it is likely to grow stronger in the future.

According to statistics from the Council for Aid to Education, Corporate America's interest in education gets stronger every year --corporations are focusing more money than ever on donations and programs for elementary and secondary schools. Corporate expenditures on pre-college education in 1993 totaled $381 million nationwide, or 15 percent of all corporate donations for that year. That's 54 times what it was three decades ago, or an increase of 5400 percent. Most of that growth in corporate spending has occurred in the last five to ten years.39

We were unable to find data on how much of this money supported non-commercial school programs, and how much went to schools with strings attached. Most likely it does not include sponsored educational materials. According to Diana Rigden, CAE's vice president for precollege programs, the cost of funding sponsored materials would be considered "cause-driven marketing" and would not count as support of education. However, equipment that is given to schools under an I'll-scratch-your-back, you-scratch-mine arrangement would.

Do corporations get tax breaks for such arrangements? It's a question worth exploring.

We polled 21 education associations to learn where they stand in this debate. The strongest opponents of commercialism in U.S. elementary and secondary schools are the National Education Association (NEA), which opposes many such activities and will fight them in the courts, and the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA). The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) is also opposed to advertising in the classroom.

Many of the other education organizations we polled felt it was up to the individual districts, supervisors, and teachers to determine policy. None of the groups actively encourages commercialism in the schools, and some are currently forming policy guidelines intended to establish minimum standard requirements for sponsored materials.

See the Ratings Charts for the responses of each of these organizations. It is worth noting that half of the groups have taken clear stands against the use of Channel One. And not one of the groups champion Channel One as a valuable teaching tool or an important part of the school day.

Positions on other types of commercial materials were mixed. Sponsored educational materials (teacher's guides, posters, workbooks, videos, etc.) elicited outright opposition only from ASCD, but most groups encourage close monitoring by teachers and principals. The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) advocates that schools and businesses develop materials through partnerships, as long as this does not result in "commercialization of instructional time." Many other groups encouraged setting standards at district and state levels, with schools responsible for evaluating sponsored educational materials case-by-case.

Positions were even less fixed with regard to the use of ad-bearing materials on school grounds. Most of the groups we polled had no official position. Those that did all mentioned that no student should be required to view commercial materials, but did not close the door on placing ads on school buses, or on print ads in classroom magazines.

EFFORTS TO CONTROL COMMERCIALISM IN SCHOOL

According to Professor Alex Molnar, who studies the problems of corporate involvement in school curricula, the struggle to insulate schools from corporate interests has been going on for years: "In 1929, the National Education Association published its Report of the Committee on Propaganda in the Schools. The report's author E.C. Broome argued that corporate sponsored materials should, in general, only be used if their use is indispensable to the education of children. If widely adopted, this principle would virtually insure that most corporate sponsored materials were taken out of classrooms." 40

Little public attention to corporate involvement in education followed the NEA report until the last twenty years, when businesses seemed to become more aggressive and flagrant in pushing their own interests into public and private education.

• In 1979, Sheila Harty wrote Hucksters in the Classroom, which descried self-serving corporate material for corrupting the educational curriculum. A decade later, she continued to warn of the ever slicker intrusions into the classroom by business interests: "Schoolchildren are not the rational consumers for whom advertising provides information relevant to logical market behavior. We must not allow them to become pawns in the game of building corporate images." 41
  
  
• In 1982, the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business (SOCAP) prepared voluntary guidelines for business-sponsored consumer education materials, in cooperation with three consumer interest groups.42 These guidelines, updated in 1989, stipulated that materials should be consistent with established fact, easily verifiable, and current; objectively reported with any sponsor bias clearly stated; complete; reported in understandable language; free of derogatory or discriminatory content; and noncommercial, with the name or logo of the sponsor used only to identify the source of the materials.
  
  
• In 1989, the International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU), now called Consumers International, issued its own "Code of Good Practice and Guidelines for Controlling Business Sponsored Educational Materials Used in Schools." The code covers many of the same points as the SOCAP guidelines. In addition, it specifies that materials should encourage awareness and cognitive evaluation of the subject among pupils, and should in no event be distributed unsolicited to pupils or teachers. The IOCU code also advocates independent assessment of all business sponsored educational materials and that schools reject any promotional materials sent to them by companies. It offers guidelines for governments, for national and regional education authorities, and for independent consumer organizations.43
  
  
• Since Channel One was launched in 1989, opposition to advertising in the classroom has included government agencies as well as educators and parents. The California Department of Education and the New York Board of Regents have fought to keep Channel One out of those states; the National Parent Teacher Association, the National Education Association, and other education In 1990, Consumers Union published Selling America's Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids of the 90's, which documented the marketing objectives for many sponsored materials, and raised objections to the growth of outright advertising in the schools.44
  
  
• Also in 1990, the Milwaukee Conference on Corporate Involvement in Schools was convened by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Education, bringing together representatives of national education associations and concerned organizations. The stated goal of the conference was to create "a set of principles to which educators and businesses can subscribe, which will distinguish those areas in which both can cooperate."

  The two-day conference produced proposed ethical guidelines for corporate involvement in schools. Although efforts to form a coalition of national education associations to endorse these guidelines proved unsuccessful, a number of national education associations did adopt the guidelines. Those guidelines stipulated that:

  
  
  

  • Corporate involvement shall not require students to observe, listen to, or read advertising.
    
    
  • Selling or providing access to a captive audience in the classroom for commercial purposes is exploitation and a violation of public trust.
    
    
  • Since school property and time are publicly funded, selling or providing free access to advertising on school property outside the classroom involves ethical and legal issues that must be addressed.
    
    
  • Corporate involvement must support the goals and objectives of the schools. Curriculum and instruction are within the purview of educators.
    
    
  • Programs of corporate involvement must be structured to meet an identified education need, not a commercial motive, and must be evaluated for educational effectiveness by the school/district on an ongoing basis.
    
    
  • Schools and educators should hold sponsored and donated materials to the same standards used for the selection and purchase of curriculum materials.
    
    
  • Corporate involvement programs should not limit the discretion of schools and teachers in the use of sponsored materials.
    
    
  • Sponsor recognition and corporate logos should be for identification rather than commercial purposes." 45
    
    

In the next section, we offer our recommendations for controlling in-school commercialism. The bottom line: Our belief is that business and schools must work together to preserve the integrity and effectiveness of our educational system. Careful self-examination is called for, and rigorous guidelines must be embraced with enthusiasm.

³⁶ Harty, Sheila. "U.S. Corporations: Still Pitching After All These Years." Educational Leadership (December 1989/January 1990): 78.

³⁷ Carlstone, Linda Mae. "A Lesson in Sample Arithmetic." Advertising Age (January 2, 1995): 22.

³⁸ "School Sponsorship: The Price Is Too High." Consuming Interest (Winter 1994): 11.

³⁹ "Corporate Contributions Post Modest Gain," a Council for Aid to Education press release (September 19, 1994).

⁴⁰ Molnar, Alex. Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of American School Reforms. Westview Press (Boulder, Co.), 1995. Pre-publication manuscript.

⁴¹ Harty, Sheila. Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools. Center for the Study of Responsive Law (Washington, D.C.), 1979.

⁴² Guidelines for Business-Sponsored Materials. Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business (SOCAP), 1989.

⁴³ IOCU Code of Good Practice and Guidelines for Controlling Business Sponsored Educational Materials Used in Schools. International Organizations of Consumers Unions (IOCU), 1989.

⁴⁴ Selling America's Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids of the 90s. Consumers Union Education Services (Yonkers, NY), 1990.

⁴⁵ "Milwaukee Conference on Corporate Involvement in Schools." Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 26-27, 1990. Coordinator: Alex Molnar, Professor of Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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