ASU Research E-Magazine: School, Inc.

Corporate advertising, sponsorships, and other forms of commercialism continue to proliferate in our public schools. Alex Molnar worries that young students are increasingly being targeted as consumers rather than nurtured as learners.

One popular fast-food franchise gives a free kid’s meal to any student who brings in a report card brandishing straight As and Bs. A competing pizza chain hands out game tokens for the same achievement. At school, students surf the Internet on free computers and plunk coins into vending machines advertising their school’s exclusive soft-drink supplier. Back at home, kids beg their parents to buy certain brands of soup, cereal, and snacks so the labels and box tops can be cashed in for school equipment.

Commercialism in education has been around for decades, and it’s ripe with upbeat buzzwords—good corporate citizenship, mutually-beneficial school-business partnerships, win-win relationships. It makes sense. Cash-strapped schools across the country are struggling to meet higher education standards with fewer teachers and larger class sizes. Meanwhile, businesses are eager to help alleviate that financial burden, while promoting their brands.

Yet, such commercialism—which gives businesses direct access to the coveted youth market—has a growing number of critics.

“Schoolhouse commercialism entails selling to schools, selling in schools, and finally, the selling of schools and of education as a marketable commodity,” says Alex Molnar, a professor of education policy studies and director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory (EPSL) at Arizona State University. “Our schools and our students should not be auctioned off to the highest commercial bidders.”

Molnar is one of the first people to take at look at advertising to children in schools as a serious academic study and as a matter of consequence for school practitioners. He has been studying the issue since the mid-1980s. Based on the fruits of his research, Molnar has long decried the practice of school commercialism. Despite increased public awareness of the issue, commercialism in schools continues to increase, in many forms and largely unabated.

Molnar also directs the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU) of the EPSL. Each year, CERU publishes a report on schoolhouse commercialism. Molnar developed the methodology for the annual study, which monitors eight categories of schoolhouse commercialism. CERU researchers study commercial activities in schools by counting media references to those activities. They conduct searches on relevant terms in the Lexis-Nexis, Education Index, and Google News databases.

“This methodology provides a useful proxy for measuring schoolhouse commercial trends without having access to any primary data,” Molnar explains. The ASU researcher holds master’s degrees in history and social work, as well as a doctorate in urban education.

CERU is funded by a grant from Consumer’s Union. It is the only national academic research unit dedicated to this topic. The research unit has been monitoring media references to schoolhouse commercialism since 1990. It was formerly located at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) under the name Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education.

Results from CERU’s 2003-2004 study found an overall increase in schoolhouse commercialism references of 9 percent. Researchers studied eight categories. They included sponsorship of school programs and activities; exclusive agreements; incentive programs; appropriation of space; sponsored educational materials; electronic marketing; privatization; and fundraising.

Media citations to several of the categories saw dramatic increases. References to appropriation of space, such as the use of school property to promote individual corporations through naming rights or general advertising, rose by 87 percent. References to electronic marketing—such as the use of broadcast, Internet, or related media in schools to target students as consumers—rose 24 percent. Fundraising references increased by 21 percent. The numbers don’t surprise Molnar. Through nearly two decades of study, he has watched the phenomenon of schoolhouse commercialism grow steadily.

“It’s become much more widespread, it’s become much more legitimate, and it has become much more intense,” he says. “So, you not only have more light bulbs, they’re brighter, too.”

Schoolhouse commercialism may be burning brighter than ever before, but its presence casts an ominous pall on the American ideal of public education. That ideal has long espoused that schools should provide a safe environment in which to prepare the next generation to participate in and contribute to a free and democratic society. Yet, the more special interests are allowed to influence that environment, the farther the educational system moves from that ideal.

CERU is guided by the belief that mixing commercial activities with public education raises fundamental issues of public policy, curriculum content, the proper relationship of educators to the students entrusted to them, and the values that the schools embody. As corporate advertising, sponsorships and other forms of commercialism proliferate in public schools, young students are increasingly being targeted as consumers rather than nurtured as learners.

Defenders of schoolhouse commercialism argue that the practice is simply a way for schools to secure much-needed additional resources.

Consider exclusive agreements like contracts with soft-drink bottlers or snack food providers. Media references to such agreements rose 122 percent in 2004, according to the CERU study, suggesting that the practice also is on the rise.

Proponents emphasize the cash infusion and scholarship money that many of these deals provide to schools and school districts. Yet, as Molnar points out, arguments in support of schoolhouse commercialism typically go no further than the purported financial benefits.

“None of the arguments really bear scrutiny from the standpoint of teaching,” he says.

What’s more, as the practice comes under increasing scrutiny, even the financial arguments are being found to bear little fruit. “Commercial Activities in School” is a publication by the U.S. General Accounting Office. It reports that, despite growing visibility, revenue from school-based commercial activities represented only a tiny percentage of the school districts’ budgets. In addition, many of the advertisements “yield no tangible commercial benefit to the schools, although they do yield benefit to the advertiser.”

Even if the schools do profit from such agreements, critics point out that they’re profiting from student consumption of unhealthy drinks and snacks. This undermines what students are taught in health and nutrition classes and contributes to the problem of childhood obesity.

Molnar has a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop and conduct a survey regarding the marketing of foods with little nutritional value in schools. His report will be released in fall 2005. Molnar wants to measure and assess the prevalence of such marketing, based on surveys of school principals across the nation. The study will supplement the annual trends survey with direct data in this specific area of school commercialism.

Despite rising criticism, some still argue that certain corporate programs do offer educational benefits to schools and children. Consider the Pizza Hut® “Book-It”® program as an example. Students can earn a free personal pan pizza certificate for reading a certain number of books.

Since 1985, the program has reached 22 million students in kindergarten through sixth grade in 50,000 schools. That is nearly 65 percent of all American elementary schools, according to the corporation. That’s a good thing, right? It not only demonstrates good corporate citizenship, but it also encourages kids to read and helps to foster a more literate workforce for the future.

Molnar disagrees.

“It helps to sell personal pan pizzas,” he scoffs, adding that there is a simpler and more direct way for Pizza Hut, or any corporation, to contribute to education. “Just give the schools the money.”

Molnar’s contempt for such programs extends beyond the corporate marketing gurus who conceive of and implement them.

“As an educator, I would be ashamed to say that the best and most effective way that I could think of to teach a child to read is by providing them with a personal pan pizza,” says Molnar. He taught for 30 years in the department of curriculum and instruction at UWM before coming to ASU. “To me, that would be a confession of professional nonfeasance and a reason for dismissal.”

For companies that truly want to be good corporate citizens (and to be viewed as such by consumers), Molnar reiterates his mantra—just give the schools the money.

“If a corporation wants to give $10,000 to an elementary school, they don’t have to do it anonymously,” he says. “But they also don’t have to send 10,000 magnets to teachers to hand out to the children in the hopes that the parents will stick it on the refrigerators and think of them.”

When administrators and teachers expose students to such advertising and promotional gimmicks in school, Molnar contends, they effectively endorse those products, undermine students’ ability to distinguish between fact and propaganda, and, ultimately, violate public trust. He addresses these issues in-depth in his latest book, School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity, to be published fall 2005 from Routledge Falmer Press.

If the data presented in CERU’s study fails to impress, Molnar says to simply take a stroll through your local school or conduct an inventory of your refrigerator magnets. Then ask yourself, what is the purpose of the public school system and how does increasing schoolhouse commercialism impact that aim? —Jessica McCann