By Andrew Stark
Reprinted
from Policy Review
2000
or 2001??
Los
angeles-based Tooned-In Menu Team, Inc., prints 4 million menus each month for
school cafeterias around the country, each one laden with ads for products such
as Pillsbury cookies or Pokemon. The deal is this: In exchange for getting
their menus done up for free, participating schools provide Tooned-In with a
ready market for its advertisers. It’s just one of a proliferating number of
arrangements forged each year between schools (or school boards) and companies.
Consider McDonald’s All-American Reading Challenge, in which McDonald’s gives
hamburger coupons to elementary-school students in exchange for their reading a
certain number of books. Or Piggly Wiggly’s offer to donate money to a school
in return for sales receipts — indicating proof of purchase at the store — from
the school community. Or the American Egg Board’s “Incredible Journey from Hen
to Home” curricular material, which is provided to schools for free while also
promoting egg consumption. Or ZapMe!, which furnishes schools with free
computer labs in return for the opportunity to run kid-oriented banner ads on
the installed browsers and collect aggregate demographic information on
students’ web-surfing habits.
In
each case, the school gets something — money, equipment, incentives for kids to
learn, curricular material — at a time of shrinking public-education budgets.
And the companies also get something: access to a lucrative market. American
teenagers spend $57 billion of their own money annually while influencing
family expenditures of $200 billion more. As important, these commercial deals
enable companies to build brand loyalty in a new generation of consumers. That
is why the term “commercialism in the schools,” with its controversial
connotations, never gets applied to the sorts of universally praised deals —
such as company-sponsored scholarship, internship, or training programs — in
which companies treat students not as future consumers but as future employees.
And
indeed commercialism in the schools is controversial; it attracts fierce
criticism. National organizations such as the Yonkers-based Consumers Union or
Oakland’s Center for Commercial Free Public Education — as well as numerous ad
hoc parental movements at the local level — have taken up arms against
commercial deals, battling companies in school board hearings and courtrooms.
Their concerns: that commercial deals cede control of the education agenda to
nonteachers, that they prey upon a captive audience, that they distort kids’
and families’ consumer choices, that they foster materialistic values, and that
kids should not be bombarded by biased, commercially motivated messages in a
place where they expect the information disseminated to be objective and
confined to pedagogical purposes. The debate has become shrill and polarized.
“I was speaking to one of my critics not long ago,” says Tooned-In’s director
of school relations, Frank Kohler. “She doesn’t own a car because she’s opposed
to the use of fossil fuels. She doesn’t go to the movies because she resents
the commercials. I said to her, ‘Lady, you don’t represent
Yet
there is a big problem with both commercialism’s critics and its defenders.
Neither side adequately distinguishes — among the many kinds of deals out there
— between those that are genuinely troubling and those that are not; both paint
with a broad brush. In the eyes of Ernest Fleishman, senior vice president for
education at Scholastic, Inc., a New York-based company that sells books and
posters through the schools, many of his antagonists “tend to use shotguns” in
their attacks. “They draw no distinctions,” Fleishman complains, between the
“very, very different kinds of deals schools strike with companies.” But what
kind of discriminations should commercialism’s critics be making? As Fleishman
himself notes, “very few school districts have guidelines covering these
matters.” And certainly, defenders of commercialism in the public schools are
themselves not always prone to drawing boundaries and ceding some ground to the
opposition. Paul Folkemer, spokesman for the controversial “Channel One” —
which beams a 12-minute newscast including two minutes of paid advertising into
12,000 schools daily — justifies his company’s business this way:
“Commercialism has always existed in the schools; think of the local drugstore
that used to advertise in the high school yearbook.” But is there no pertinent
way of distinguishing Channel One from the high school yearbook?
If
we were going to draw lines between the various kinds of commercialism so
understood, the best way to begin would be to distinguish two basic types of
commercial deal, types well exemplified by the contrary arrangements Pizza Hut
and Domino’s have struck with American schools. On the one hand, Pizza Hut will
reward children who read a certain number of books in a particular period of
time with free pizza. On the other, Domino’s will reward kids who buy pizza —
or more exactly their school, which sends the receipts in to the local
franchise — with free books. The dynamics of these two programs precisely
reverse one another. In the Pizza Hut deal, students perform an act that is
supposedly part of their role in the public schools: They read. In return, what
the company offers is a private-market commodity: pizza. With the Domino’s
arrangement, kids slip outside of their public-school roles and perform a
private-market act by buying pizza. In return, the company furnishes schools
with the wherewithal to buy public goods — goods which are of value to the
teaching role of the public schools, such as books.
As
it turns out, the Pizza Hut and Domino’s programs aptly symbolize the two basic
kinds of arrangements companies invariably make with schools; almost every instance
of commercialism falls into one or the other category. Either, as in the Pizza
Hut deal, the school offers a public good — students’ reading time, or
classroom space, or curricular access — and the company reciprocates with
whatever private-market commodity it happens to sell, whether pizza, coupons
for orange juice, or samples of spaghetti sauce, sometimes dressed up as
curricular material. Or, as with the Domino’s deal, the school offers the
company something of private-market value — namely, its own students as
consumers — and what the company offers the school is materiel or monies of
public value: books, equipment, computers, or outright cash gifts that have no
connection with whatever it is the company sells. The first kind of deal can be
troubling, but not for the reason most critics believe. The second, however, is
simply far less disturbing than critics allow.
From
public good to private benefit
egin
by considering a few examples of the first kind of deal, the Pizza Hut-type.
Minute Maid, for instance, has staged its own version of the Pizza Hut
arrangement: Students would read — that is, they would do something that is
part of their role in the public schools— and what they would get in return
were book covers advertising Minute Maid’s private-market commodity, orange
juice, or rebates on purchases. A few years ago, in a similar vein, schools
across the country struck an agreement with General Mills, according to which
they would devote classroom time — a public good — to a science experiment in
which students would pop free samples of Fruit Gushers (the company’s new
private-market commodity) into their mouths, making comparisons between the
resulting sensation and the dynamics of volcanic eruptions. A prominent
Campbell’s Soup deal — which offered schools a science experiment purporting to
show that its Prego spaghetti sauce is thicker than Unilever’s Ragu — fell into
the same category. As did a sixth-grade math textbook, published by McGraw Hill
and introduced into public curricula around the country, which featured a
passel of references to brand-name private-market commodities such as Nike and
Gatorade.
In
all of these cases, the school offered something in its public capacity — its
own classroom time and space — and the company reciprocated with whatever it
happened to sell on the private market — orange juice, spaghetti sauce —
wrapped in some form of curricular material. The typical deal struck by Channel
One, the 800-pound bęte noire of commercialism critics, falls into the same
category. What the school turns over to Channel One is the public good of
classroom time: The typical Channel One deal calls for 90 percent of a school’s
students to watch the show, beamed daily by satellite, on 90 percent of
schooldays. In return, what Channel One furnishes is its own private-market
commodity — namely, two minutes daily of advertising for other private
commodities such as Reebok or Nintendo — wrapped in current-events curricular
material, the ten minutes daily of news coverage its programs provide.
It’s
true that Channel One also gives each subscribing school approximately $17,000
worth of wholly public goods, in the form of free tv and satellite dish
equipment. Yet both Channel One and its critics deny that these public goods
are of much value to schools. Noting that “a couple of hundred schools haven’t
even asked for [the equipment],” Channel One’s Folkemer says that “if the deal
was just to get the equipment, schools wouldn’t continue it. Equipment is not
that significant.” Channel One’s opponents, such as Alex Molnar of the
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, agree, denying that the equipment Channel
One offers is “valuable to the school[s even] in the most crass commercial
terms.” Of course, the two sides have different motives for dismissing the
utility of Channel One’s gifts of videos and satellite equipment. Channel One
does so to allay any charge that schools are taking its programs because of the
free equipment rather than the educational merits of the programming; critics,
for their part, want to argue that Channel One is exploiting schools, getting
valuable advertising access to children’s minds in exchange for virtually
nothing. But the bottom line is this: If indeed the public good of free
equipment means so little, as both Channel One and its critics seem to agree,
then the Channel One deal remains essentially identical to the Pizza Hut,
Minute Maid, and Fruit Gusher arrangements. What the school turns over is
public curricular space and classroom time, and what the company provides in
return is essentially a private-market commodity — in this case, advertising —
fashioned in a curricular package that inserts itself into the public time and
space made available.
What’s
so wrong with these kinds of deals? Critics have a full quiver, but the most
prominent salvo misses. On it, the problem with Channel One — or Minute Maid’s
book covers or Campbell’s curricular material — is that, installed as they are
inside the classroom, their promotional efforts prey upon a captive audience.
If the company’s pitch were removed even to the cafeteria, as with Kohler’s
menus, that would be a different story: Students don’t have to eat lunch there.
Better still that the ads should move onto the school roof: There is little to
say against the two suburban Dallas school rooftops that feature Dr. Pepper ads
for overflying planes. But as the public space which the school makes available
to a private commodity’s promotional material moves from the outer perimeters
of the building to the inner sanctum of the classroom, the audience grows more
captive; the private-market advertisements, consequently, more allegedly
harmful. In a 1995 memo concerning Channel One, the New York State Department
of Education put it this way: “It’s [sic] mission is to . . . deliver up a
large, captive . . . audience to advertisers.” And this, presumably, is a bad
thing.
But
is it? Captivity is double-edged. If a captive audience means that Channel
One’s ads might carry more suasive clout than otherwise — because students
can’t avoid them — it also means that the content of the surrounding news
material might be of greater quality than otherwise. It is harder to accuse
Channel One, as some accuse pbs, of feeling under pressure to water down the
quality of its programming to attract the audiences that corporate sponsors
desire, precisely because Channel One’s viewers can’t go anywhere.
Accordingly,
some critics of Channel One backpedal. Far from berating Channel One for
exploiting a captive audience, they instead adopt an assault based on denying
that its audience is all that captive. Students, they say, actually have a
tendency to mentally wander, do homework, gossip, or simply space out during
the Channel One broadcast; and this, they worry, means that Channel One faces
an enormous incentive to dilute its news content, rendering it ever more glitzy
and gimmicky, in order to attract student attention. Channel One’s news
broadcasts, the media critic Mark Crispin Miller has written, rely on
“brilliant, zippy graphics,” a “young and pretty .. . . team of anchors,” and
content that is “compressed and superficial” in order to compel the attention
of students — precisely because they tend to “zone out,” as Miller puts it,
during broadcasts. “The content of Channel One News,” says William Hoynes, a
Vassar sociologist who has studied the company’s programming, “suggests the
difficulties of holding the attention of even captive audiences;” it’s clear,
Hoynes writes, “that Channel One has consequently tailored a [news] product
that is, first and foremost, about inducing students to pay attention, with a
relentlessly hip style and . . . gimmicks.”
If,
however, students’ attention can and does wander, is it not misconceived to
describe them as constituting a “captive” audience? Either the audience is captive,
in which case the ads are potent but the news programming encounters less of a
need to be diluted — or else students’ minds are free to roam, in which case
programmers might be tempted to water down the news content but the ads likely
have less impact. It’s true that one study has shown that students tend to
remember more about Channel One’s ads than about the news content; but since
they are equally captive (or noncaptive) in either case, captivity per se —
notwithstanding its mantra-like appearance in criticisms of Channel One — isn’t
the issue. The captivity critique is not quite ready for prime time.
There
is, however, a qualified critique of the Channel One deal — and, by extension,
the McGraw Hill or Minute Maid arrangements — that has some merit. In a much
cited 1993 study, Michael Morgan, a professor of communications at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reported that “Channel One is most
often found in schools . . . that have the least amount of money to spend on
conventional educational resources.” Among poorer schools — where total
spending per student is $2,599 per year or less — about six in 10 take Channel
One. But among wealthier schools — those that spend at least $6,000 — only
about one in 10 subscribe. Morgan’s conclusion: For those schools that cannot
even afford books and maps, the free 10 minutes of news content itself — forget
the tv sets and the satellite dishes — may, by filling a curricular void, prove
sufficient to overcome any reservations teachers harbor about Channel One’s
content. As the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education puts it, in
“schools where text books are old or there is no money for supplemental
materials,” Channel One — or Campbell’s Soup or General Mills curricular
material — “can be a popular way for teachers to brighten a subject up.” David
Shenk, a fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, agrees: “Poorly
funded school districts are the most likely [to take Channel One or Campbell’s
or Minute Maid curricular products] because prefabricated lesson plans save
preparation time and provide relief for overburdened teachers.” A Wall Street
Journal article a few years back reported on the case of Laurie Bjoriykke, a
third grade teacher in Gaithersburg, Md., who “says she has no textbooks for
her history and science classes” and so “shows two corporate tapes a month to
supplement her resources.”
What
all of this means, says the Consumers Union’s Charlotte Baecher, is that
schools taking Channel One have put themselves into a kind of “conflict of
interest.” As with all public officials, teachers should make their official
decisions — including their decisions about how to allocate curricular time and
classroom space — on the merits, according to the public interest, and not on
the basis of their need for private support. Of course, the kind of deal
represented by Channel One is not the most serious kind of conflict of interest
imaginable: That’s the kind where an official has the capacity to use her
public role to benefit a private company in return for a personal payment.
Instead, the Channel One arrangement resembles the milder form of conflict (but
one still statutorily regulated at the federal level) in which officials take
something of value from a private company not for themselves personally, but to
help serve the purposes of their cash-strapped public agency. The rule is that
the public agenda should never be skewed by an agency’s need for private
assistance, let alone the official’s personal desire for private gain. As Sen.
Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, recently put it, “I want [school]
decision makers to be able to decide for themselves rather than have to settle
for a ‘deal.’”
The
fact that Channel One makes its way preponderantly into poorer schools,
however, confronts not only those schools but the company itself with a
problem. Jim Metrock, a former steel industry executive who now heads an
Alabama-based anti-Channel One organization called Obligation, notes that
because Channel One “is going into school systems where kids may not be able to
pay for the product, Channel One’s advertisers” might not be “getting the
audience they paid for . . . probably the demographics are different.” Kevin
Gordon of the California School Boards Association agrees: “Their hope was that
they’d be in all sorts of markets,” Gordon says, “but that hasn’t happened.”
William Hoynes adds that Channel One wanted to “be seen to reach the youth
market, not the poor youth market.”
Ironically,
then, while the Channel One-type deal might skew the curricular path taken by
poorer schools, it also, in a way, threatens to skew the marketing path taken
by the company. Just as schools risk making public decisions based not on the
public-interest merits but on extraneous private inducements, companies like
Channel One risk making their private-market decisions — their decisions as to
where to prospect for consumers — based not on which schools are the most
privately lucrative, but on the extraneous consideration as to which are most
publicly needy. Channel One’s former president for programming, Andy Hill,
acknowledges that if the company “went to advertisers and said ‘poorer kids
watch our programs,’ that would be insane.” Yet he maintains that he “hasn’t
seen a demographic breakdown” of Channel One’s audience and concedes that “all
other things being equal, a wealthier school is less likely to be enticed” by
the curricular material Channel One offers. Indeed, Hill says, if the “far
left-wing Democrats who oppose Channel One instead devoted their energy to
electing politicians who would raise funding for public schools, Channel One
would be gone quickly.”
The
typical Channel One deal, then, embarks the company on a mild perversion of its
purposes, leading it to prospect for markets not where the private capacity to
pay for the products it advertises is highest, but where the public needs for
its curricular material are greatest. In the same way, it is likely that
Channel One embarks some schools on a mild perversion of their purposes,
causing them to make decisions on how to allocate public space and time not on
the basis of the public interest — the pedagogical merits — but according to
the blandishments offered by a private enterprise. In this sense, this first
type of “commercialism” arrangement — where what the school offers is its own
public space and time, and what the company supplies is its own private-market
commodity or advertising for it — can rankle on both sides.
From
private market to public benefit
n
the second form of school commercialism, however, the school does not offer the
company its students in their public role as students — or public curricular
time or public classroom space — but rather centers exclusively on students and
parents in their private-market role, as active purchasers of commodities. And
what the company offers the school is a public good, pure and simple — such as
equipment, computers, or a cash bequest — purged of any association with the
company’s own private-market commodity. In the Domino’s example, students buy
pizza, the school gets books. Or take another example: Parents in many states
purchase products from their local Wal-Mart and return the receipts to the
neighborhood school, which then sends the receipts back to Wal-Mart, which in
turn rewards the school with free computer lessons for its students. Apple’s
“Apples for Students Program” does much the same with Apple computers: Students
and their families purchase produce from a local grocery store which then, in a
deal with Apple, provides the school with free or reduced-price computers once
a certain threshold of purchases has been reached. Hershey or Orville
Redenbacher, likewise, will give a school cash for every candy wrapper or
popcorn label its parents and children send in.
Brita
Butler-Wall, who led an ultimately unsuccessful fight to keep advertising out
of Seattle’s schools, calls such arrangements “travesties.” She and other
critics indict them both because of what they mean for the students and because
of what they imply about the companies. As far as the students are concerned,
Consumers Union complains, deals such as Apple’s or Wal-Mart’s teach them “to
choose products or stores for all the wrong reasons” — not on the basis of the
private-market criteria of price and quality, which is what they should be learning
to use, but rather skewed by the hope of gaining some form of public benefit
for the school. As for the companies providing cash or equipment to schools in
exchange, Consumers Union argues, they are not doing so for purely altruistic
reasons but rather are engaging in “self-serving philanthropy,” giving because
they expect to reap a return in goodwill. Companies’ gifts of public goods such
as books, equipment, or the cash to buy them — which should be made purely on
the public-spirited criteria of generosity and benevolence — are instead being
skewed by the hope of gaining some private benefit.
But
the critics say too much. In such arrangements, both the school and the company
are no longer compromising their principal roles, having stepped outside of them.
The school is no longer a public forum but a private market; the company no
longer a private enterprise but a public philanthropist. As far as the school
is concerned, there is thus no turning over of any kind of public space — let
alone the sanctum of the classroom — to the service of private ends. Rather,
the school community’s private-market decisions are being diverted to serve
public ends. And this is no more troubling than, say, someone’s holding in his
wallet a Sierra Club or Multiple Sclerosis Society affinity credit card, where
his determination as to whether to buy a particular private-market commodity
can get colored, at the margins, by his knowledge that in paying for it he’ll
benefit a favored public cause.
As
for the company — say Wal-Mart or Apple — it does not (as does Channel One)
find itself directing a promotional campaign to markets where the public needs
for curricular filler may be large but the private capacity to buy its products
meager. Instead, in these arrangements, the company steps entirely outside of
its profit-making role and enters a philanthropic one. And in distributing its
public largesse, it simply does what many a company does, namely, allow itself
to be guided by the need to cultivate a private market. This is no more
troubling than what happens when a mogul builds a hospital wing named after his
company.
But
there is a further wrinkle here. Even with deals of this relatively benign sort
— in which the school offers a private market and the company a public good — there
lurks, critics say, an insidious danger. There is a tendency, they argue, for
the private market in question to move from outside the school to inside.
During the 1997-98 school year, South Fork High School in Florida’s Marlin
County executed a deal with Pepsi on which — instead of students buying Pepsi
at local stores in return for a corporate gift to the school — Pepsi got the
exclusive right to sell drinks to students within the school itself, in return
for which the school got $155,000 cash. A year later, the Colorado Springs
school district awarded Coke a similar privilege in return for $8 million over
10 years.
More
and more such arrangements are cropping up. And here, critics say, an added
problem emerges. Unlike the Wal-Mart and Apple deals, where students and
parents buy products outside of the school — and where they retain the option
of shopping at Sears or buying from ibm should they prefer — when the market
moves inside the school, such choices often evaporate. When Coke won its
contract with Colorado Springs, 53 schools had to jettison their Pepsi machines
as part of the arrangement. “Exclusivity,” says Brita Butler-Wall, “is against
free enterprise; it means a lack of consumer choice.” The Consumers Union’s
Charlotte Baecher agrees. “Look at the great diversity of beverages you and I
had when we were kids after a school football game,” Baecher says; “today, with
exclusive pouring arrangements, kids don’t have the same broad range of
choice.” Echoing this concern, the Berkeley school board recently tried to make
an in-school marketing deal with Pepsi more palatable by requiring the company
to offer a variety of drink alternatives in its school vending machines.
It
is, though, a little hard to take this “exclusivity” complaint seriously. Critics
of commercialism in the schools are (or at least should be) coming from a
perspective on which there’s too much consumerism — too much commodity choice —
in the schools, not too little. A critic of commercialism in the schools who
complains that a particular deal is “against free enterprise,” or that it fails
to offer students a range of soft-drink alternatives, needs to do a little more
work on her argument. It was, after all, the city of Berkeley that 30 years ago
gave prominence to the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Choices such as the
one between Coke and Pepsi, Marcuse famously declared, are a form of
“repressive tolerance,” a false dichotomy staged by capitalists to distract
people from the real, more fundamental choice between “wage slavery” and
socialism. Odd that Berkeley should now be passing laws designed to preserve
such small-beer choices in the school, as if the presence of Coke but not Pepsi
were some form of deprivation. “Anticommercialism” is the last movement that
should be taking such a position.
It’s
true that some critics zero in on Coke or Pepsi deals because the drinks are so
lacking in nutritional value. “Calcium intake among active girls who have
switched from milk to soft drinks,” declares Maryland anti-commercialism activist
Michael Tabor, “has decreased bone density.” This attack, however, would have
more credibility if the Consumers Union publication Captive Kids hadn’t also
scrutinized the Dairy Council of Wisconsin’s “Delicious Decisions” curricular
material for signs of “bias toward milk products.”
What
concerns over captivity are to the first kind of deal — where what the school
offers is its public space — concerns about exclusivity are to the second kind
of deal, where what the school offers is a private market. Both worries are red
herrings. In witness whereof, it’s worth noting that corporate practitioners of
the first kind of deal — such as Channel One vice president Jeff Ballabon —
defend themselves in a backhanded way by assailing the second kind of deal, the
Coke or Pepsi arrangements, precisely for their exclusivity. “The deals schools
make with vendors to feature only their products in the schools,” Ballabon
says: “that smacks to me of commercialism.” Returning the compliment,
practitioners of the second kind of deal — such as Dan DeRose, whose dd
Marketing helps forge Coke and Pepsi arrangements — take aim at the first kind
of deal, the Channel One arrangement, for preying on a captive audience.
“Personally,” DeRose told a 1998 symposium, “we feel that [commercialism]
should stay out of the classroom.”
Frank
Kohler’s fretfulness notwithstanding, when it comes to commercialism in the
schools, it is possible to draw lines. When a school gives over classroom space
to a company like Minute Maid — in return for book covers advertising Minute
Maid’s orange juice products — each party hazards the perversion of its
principal role: its role as a public entity in the case of the school; its role
as a private profit-making entity in the case of the company. The school risks
suborning public space to private purposes, not public criteria. And the
company risks aiming its promotions at student bodies which are the most
publicly needy, not necessarily the most privately lucrative.
On
the other hand, when a school steps out of its public role to create a private
market for a grocery store’s products — and when in turn the store steps out of
its private profit-making role and contributes something of public value, such
as Apple computers, to the school — what happens is relatively benign. It
should be difficult to find fault with students whose private market purchases
are guided by their hope of winning some public goods for their school.
Likewise with businesses whose public philanthropy is affected by their desire
for private gain.
Of
course, just because it is possible to draw lines between the two types of deal
doesn’t mean they never get blurred. General Mills once had an arrangement
whereby children would collect box tops from its cereal products — acting in
their private-market roles as consumers, not their public roles as students —
yet what they got in return were not public goods such as books, equipment or
cash, but school visits from the Trix Bunny, who would urge them to consume
more of the company’s private-market commodities.
It
is hard not to raise one’s eyebrows at such a deal. But beyond this rare
line-blurring instance, most commercialism arrangements fall into either one
class or the other, resembling either the Minute Maid or the Apple deal. The
problem with commercialism’s critics is that they tend to place the two on a
par — finding fault equally with the Minute Maid orange juice and the Apple
Computer arrangements. In so doing, they paint with too broad a brush. When it
comes to commercialism in the schools, as in so many other areas of life, it’s
important not to mix apples with oranges.