Tracking Commercializing Activities in America’s Schools

Alex Molnar

Professor and Director

Commercialism in Education Research Unit

Arizona State University

The Texas agriculture commissioner is not the sort of person one would expect to be depicted in jackboots, but a few years ago when Susan Combs, a Republican, issued new regulations toughening the state’s policies on junk food in schools, her critics reacted quickly.  Combs instituted a ban on sodas and candy bars in schools and restrictions on cookies and chips. While the policy won praise from the School Nutrition Association, the rhetoric soon heated up.  Talk show hosts castigated her as a “Food Nazi,” as if limiting children’s access to unhealthful snacks was the moral equivalent of genocide.[1]  And she was not alone:  Maine State Rep. Sean Flaircloth, defending a proposed state tax on sodas to be used to help combat childhood obesity, found himself attacked not only as a “Nazi” but as a “communist.”[2]

The heated language mirrors the aggressive lobbying tactics some soft drink makers undertook over the years to fight bans on their products in the nation’s public schools.  In Connecticut last year Coke and Pepsi succeeded in delaying a bill to ban soda and junk food vending machines in schools after marshalling an extensive lobbying campaign that enlisted union beverage-truck drivers, school coaches, and school boards.  Between them, the Connecticut lobbyists working for Coke and Pepsi on the legislation were paid a reported $130,000 a year, with an additional $7,350 a month going to one of the firms.[3]

Overheated rhetoric and deep-pockets lobbying are two illustrations of how controversial advertising in schools has become.  Press reports over the past several years document clearly mounting criticism of marketing to children in school, especially if marketing activities are thought to have a negative impact on children’s health.

Schoolhouse commercialism includes a wide range of corporate marketing activities.  It entails the use of schools by businesses as a venue to promote their products and services to students and their families as well as to reinforce the value of consumption as the golden road to happiness.

Since 1998 my colleagues at the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (www.schoolcommercialism.org) and I have used media citations to track commercializing activities in schools. The categories of commercialism tracked include:

1. Sponsorship of Programs and Activities:  Corporations paying for or subsidizing school events or one-time activities in return for the right to associate their name with the events and activities.   

2. Exclusive Agreements:  Agreements between schools and corporations that give corporations the exclusive right to sell and promote their goods or services in the school district — for example, exclusive pouring rights for Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola.  In return, the district or school receives a percentage of the profits derived from the arrangement.

3. Incentive Programs:  Corporate programs that provide money, goods, or services to a student, school, or school district when its students, parents, or staff, engage in a specified activity.

4. Appropriation of Space:  The allocation of school space such as scoreboards, rooftops, bulletin boards, walls, and textbooks on which corporations may place corporate logos or advertising messages for a wide range of products, including soft drinks and snack foods.

5. Sponsored Educational Materials (SEMs):  Materials supplied by corporations or trade associations that claim to have an instructional content.

6. Electronic Marketing:  The provision of electronic programming, equipment, or both in return for the right to advertise to students or their families and community members in the school or when they contact the school or district. 

7. Privatization:  Management of schools or school programs by private, for-profit corporations or other non-public entities. 

8. Fundraising:  Commercial programs marketed to schools to raise funds for school programs and activities, including door-to-door sales, affinity marketing programs, and similar ventures.

Allowing for some peaks and valleys in individual categories, overall levels of school commercialism have relentlessly increased over the past decade and a half.  Sadly, educators have by and large been silent or, worse, cheerleaders for marketing in schools.  To some degree, commercial activities now shape the structure of the school day, influence the content of the school curriculum, and determine whether children have access to a variety of technologies.  The effort to more fully integrate the schoolhouse into corporate marketing plans by securing control over as many school-based advertising media as possible may well be the trend to watch over the next decade. If so, we can expect schools to serve as launch pads for marketing campaigns that resemble high profile movie releases complete with multiple tie-ins for a variety of products and services aimed at children and their families.

The scope of modern advertising is almost impossible to quantify. It might well be easier to identify those areas where advertising is not present (there won’t be many) than to document the volume of advertising unleashed on the American public. There is little doubt that contemporary Americans live in an advertising-saturated environment and lead what Savan termed "sponsored lives."  If the methods of modern mass marketing to adults threaten the happiness of individuals and undermine the well being of our society, deploying them against children colonizes our future. No one can seriously suggest that children represent the rational consumer of market ideology; that is, children can in no sense be considered to have the same power, information, and freedom that adults are said to have to freely enter into contracts for goods and services in the idealized market place. Advertising to children is then a kind of immoral war on childhood, waged for the profit of adults who should be childhood’s guardians. Furthermore, when advertising is conducted in schools the immorality is compounded because the power of the state is twisted to the service of special interests, the ethical standing of educators compromised, and orientation of the school shifted toward mis-educative experiences.

If advertising is, as I believe, the twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week, three hundred and sixty-five day a year curriculum of our culture then Americans young and old are being relentlessly mis-educated and, as a consequence, our society is correspondingly less democratic.