The Selling of Our Schools: Advertising in the Classroom
Are our kids for sale to the highest bidder?
Do we tell them proper nutrition is important and then plaster the school's walls with signs saying,
"Things Go Better With Coke"?
Advertising in schools is nothing new. What's new is the persuasiveness of it and the price
tags school superintendents, school boards, and booster clubs are putting on its value. Some schools
work independently on requests for proposals to draw in corporate dollars from the companies that
are eager to get in their doors. Others join a system-wide approach to snare those corporate dollars,
and a few hire consulting firms to help them wrangle the larger sums.
Mike Roumph, vice-president of D.D. Marketing in Pueblo, Colorado, estimates exclusive contracts
with soft drink companies alone net a school an average $30 to $35 per student annually. A well-planned
soft drink advertising program can generate between $100,000 and $300,000 for a district. Although
most schools reject sponsors with political, religious, alcohol, tobacco, and violent or blatant
sexual overtones; many are investigating contracts with shoe companies, restaurants, hotel chains,
and telecommunication companies as well as the contracts with the cola giants.
As an alternative to fund-raising, school systems have begun to look at corporate dollars to
fund just about everything. Schools need funding for in-school activities and equipment, and,
in order to reduce the number of children going home to empty houses, they provide and then need
to fund many after-school activities. Product advertisements can be found almost everywhere in
schools. They are frequently in stadiums, gymnasiums, school cafeterias, hallways, and on textbook
covers. In Colorado Springs ads are placed on school buses, and in Grapevine-Colleyfield (Texas)
schools ad space is offered on school roofs that are in the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport
flight path. In Utah ads are even in some student restrooms.
CORPORATE CURRCIULUM MATERIALS
Instead of placing ads up, some companies provide teachers with curriculum kits that mix educational
lessons with frequent references to their products or corporate name. For example, in some communities,
children use mathematics worksheets with Disney characters and when done see clips from the video.
A nonprofit research group, The Milwaukee Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education,
recently discovered that these corporate-sponsored classroom materials often subtly steer class
lessons in directions advantageous to the sponsor.
School children are a lucrative market. According to the Hartford Courant ("Public Schools Studying
Future in Advertising," April 24,1998), "In 1997, U.S. children 12 and under spent and influenced
spending at a record $500 billion...increasing by 20% a year, ...that could lead to more than
$1 trillion in such spending by 2002. And teenagers age 17 and younger will make up the largest
portion of the nation's population in coming years." Since designer labels and brand names play
an important role in defining status and social acceptance to many youths, getting them to buy
and then become loyal to a particular product at an early age can ensure companies a profitable
future. Marketers are starting to hawk not only children's products but also "adult" purchases,
such as cars and vacations, supplying their captive, impressionable audiences with arguments they
can use to pitch the requests to parents.
WHAT CAN BE DONE? IS MEDIA LITERACY THE ANSWER?
What can be done? "Reading, writing, and...buying?" (Consumers Report, September 1998) lists
some possibilities. Among them:
If budgets for education are tight, communities could raise corporate taxes or taxes in general
so that schools do not need to rely on corporate-sponsored programs to meet financial need.
Schools that do permit corporate sponsorship could review all corporate-sponsored materials
used to ensure that they are accurate, objective, complete, nondiscriminatory, and non-commercial
except for the corporate logo used only for identification.
In addition, schools and/or parents could teach children media literacy. Zillions, a magazine
for young people from the creators of Consumer Reports, is one magazine that teaches children
to become savvy consumers. Each month the magazine evaluates in an unbiased fashion several products
that children might be interested in purchasing. Some feel that in our media saturated society
the ability to "read" advertising and become literate media consumers may be every bit as essential
as the ability to read traditional print.
If we increased children's critical awareness of the ways they are being targeted for commercial
purposes, if we helped children identify the emotional appeals the advertisers try to make, and
if we encouraged children to dissect the images and messages, this might help diffuse the effects
of advertising. If we helped children better understand commercial pitches, we might be able to
avoid the negative aspects of corporate sponsorship while still reaping its benefits.
Related Resources
ADDITIONAL ONLINE MEDIA LITERACY RESOURCES
To obtain a free cassette and additional information about media literacy, contact UNPLUG,
360 Grand Ave., Oakland, CA 94610 or Email: unplug@igc.org.apc
Are our kids for sale to the highest bidder?
Do we tell them proper nutrition is important and then plaster the school's walls with signs saying,
"Things Go Better With Coke"?