Public Education for Private Gain

The nation's education crisis is great news for Madison Avenue. As school budgets are slashed and teachers are overworked, administrators are all but begging corporate America to fill the financial gap. And big business is only too happy to oblige, providing free equipment, free curricular materials, free video programs, and fund-raising games.

To the casual onlooker, generous companies give schools what they need in return for modest recognition. But the growing "school-business partnership" is neither benign nor altruistic. Rather than solving the education crisis, corporations are exploiting it for profit. From a high school news program that forces students to watch commercials daily to corporate-sponsored curricula designed to serve a company or industry, this new "partnership" is turning teachers and schools into corporate shills and students into a captive market.

Consumers Union reported in 1990 that 20 million school students a year use corporate-sponsored teaching materials--ranging in promotional content from a company's logo on a poster to deliberately slanted information.

Consider some recent examples:

- Christopher Whittle has co-opted more than 12,000 schools nationwide to force his company's Channel One program on their students. Whittle's contract stipulates that students must watch two minutes of advertisements a day in return for free video equipment and a flashy news show. (Whittle's own study found that students exposed to Channel One had little or no better knowledge of current events than those who aren't.)

- Revlon's "Hot Looks, Cool Style" program targets one million teen-age girls in home economics classes. Ostensibly to help self-esteem, the poster-size guide suggests activities called "Good Hair Day/Bad Hair Day" and "Hair Necessities," in which students list the three products they would "have to have" on a desert island. The guide, sent to 29,000 teachers, features styling tips and an ad for Revlon's hair products for teens.

- Exxon sponsors the "Energy Cube" program for high school physics students, which entirely omits issues of fuel efficiency, alternatives to fossil fuels, and global warming. It does, however, include a game that challenges students to reverse the warming of a hypothetical planet. The "correct" answer is not to reduce fossil fuel use, but rather to turn up the air conditioning.

- A Mobil educational video, Polystyrene Plastics and the Environment, purports to counter "hasty conclusions about what is good or not good for the environment." News anchor Jim Hartz claims on the video that plastics are the "ideal materials" to produce, recycle, burn, or just toss in landfills. Mobil is a major plastics manufacturer.

- CBS Records cloaked a national promotion for Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire" as a history lesson plan. According to Scholastic, Inc., which developed the materials, Joel "encourages students and teachers to use the song as a way to kick off a class discussion....What began as a promotional effort to distribute cassette tapes of the song to over 4 million junior and senior high school students rocketed to nationwide acclaim."

IT'S NO WONDER that advertisers are turning to the vulnerable kid market. Children and teen-agers spend an estimated $90 billion annually on consumer goods--in addition to the more than $130 billion they influence in adult spending. And while kids today may be savvy about specific advertising claims, they nevertheless embrace the more general consumer ethic: happiness, popularity, and friendship come with buying goods.

Marketing firms such as Scholastic, Inc., Modern Talking Pictures, and Lifetime Learning Systems are happy to educate companies who may have overlooked the prepubescent gold mine. "Kids spend 40 percent of each day in the classroom where traditional advertising can't reach them," Lifetime wrote in a trade magazine ad. "Now, you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind."

Some school officials say that given our ad-saturated culture, a few odd logos at school is no additional burden. But the schoolhouse should be a non-commercial sanctuary where kids can learn to be critical of the mass media--not an open market where they are subjected to even more hucksterism. Compulsory attendance laws were not enacted to ensure a captive audience for advertisers. Taxpayers do not support a public service to have it used for private gain.

Moreover, the school lends its implied endorsement to any product advertised in the classroom. A 1991 survey of North Carolina schools found that most students believed products advertised on Channel One, such as Coke and Snickers, were good for them because they were shown at school.

Teachers and administrators cannot be relied upon to screen corporate-sponsored curricula, much of which presents distorted information. Do we want to entrust environmental education to polluters, or health education to junk food manufacturers? Even with factual presentations, companies are establishing trust among kids who are still unfamiliar with corporations' dubious track records.

Commercializing public education is no solution to the education crisis. Corporations that insist they are motivated by public spirit should pay enough taxes so that states can resist the lure of commercial offers. The tax-exempt status of in-school advertising--which, like all advertising, is fully tax-deductible--should be lifted to both raise revenue and reduce the incentive to advertise in schools.

Local school boards should adopt strict guidelines for corporate involvement in schools. Without such measures, the classroom will lose its independence, and with it its ability to turn out discriminating citizens.

Karen Brown was research director for the Center for the Study of Commercialism, a Washington, D.C. based organization concerned with excessive commercialism in America, when this article appeared.