The recent news that McGraw-Hill Inc. had published an elementary-school math textbook full of brand names shocked some parents, but it didn't shock anyone who's been keeping a close eye on American education. The math book -- with its references to Nike, Gatorade and Sony Play Stations -- is hardly the most egregious example of commercialism infiltrating schools.
Eager to attract a captive audience of young customers, marketers are showering public schools with advertising and hucksterism. Dozens of large corporations, from Exxon to McDonald's, now sponsor a wide variety of in-school marketing projects.
Some companies pay school districts to get posters touting their products displayed on schoolbuses and in cafeterias, or sponsor educational programs in exchange for advertising space. Others create curricular materials -- like an exercise book that purports to teach third-graders math by having them count Tootsie Rolls. Many cash-strapped schools find it hard to resist these free publications. And state laws requiring the screening of textbooks do not cover the corporate-sponsored handouts.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi have turned some schools into virtual sales agents for their products. Districts across the country have signed multimillion-dollar "pouring rights" contracts, which give a soft-drink company exclusive permission to distribute its products in schools.
The rush to get computers into classrooms has opened up new commercial inroads. ZapMe, a Silicon Valley company, gives schools free personal computers and Internet access in exchange for the right to display a constant stream of on-screen advertisements. Participating schools must also promise that the systems will be in use for at least four hours per school day.
This onslaught raises fundamental issues of public policy, curriculum content, the proper relationship of educators to students and the values that schools embody. Yet few parents are aware of just how much commercial material exists in their children's schools, and fewer still have a voice in deciding whether it should be there at all.
In Colorado Springs, Colo., for example, a local newspaper recently published a leaked memo from a top school official to administrators urging them to boost Coca-Cola sales by allowing students virtually unlimited access to Coke products, including in the classroom. Many parents had previously been unaware that the school system had signed an exclusive contract with the soft-drink manufacturer -- or that the district had a sales quota to meet in exchange for payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 a year per school.
Such contracts are often negotiated and signed in private, without public notice or meetings. But in some districts, parents have started to demand a role in deciding when and how corporations should be allowed into the classrooms.
In Seattle, parents organized a series of "commercialism walk-throughs" of the city's schools, collecting as many examples of commercial material as they could. Their findings helped stop a proposed district-wide policy that would have allowed corporate advertising in schools, and led to the formation of a school/community task force to study the issue.
Public officials, too, have begun to address the problem.
A member of California's state assembly has introduced bills that would ban commercial logos and brand names in state-endorsed textbooks and prohibit school districts from signing exclusive marketing contracts that require in-school advertising.
Still, in the battle over commercial access to schools, it's corporations that have the upper hand. Unless more parents, teachers and politicians start paying attention, consumerism may replace learning as the predominant value in American public education.
Steven Manning is a research fellow at the Open Society Institute.
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