Is tide starting to turn on advertising in school?
In: International Herald Tribune, special report, pp 15, 19.
By Rick Smith (IHT)
Tuesday, February 18, 2003PARIS:
The attention span of schoolchildren, not long in the best of circumstances and allegedly getting shorter, is a prize that is pitting some of the world's largest corporations against a growing cohort of angry opposition groups.
A good many of the Fortune 500, often with the assistance or initiative of funds-hungry school administrators, are steadily finding new and creative ways to place their logos, products and messages in school corridors, in textbooks, in computers, in cafeterias - and, in one recent twist, even using the teachers themselves. McDonald's has been running a campaign called McTeacher's Nights for the last two years in 16 western U.S. states. Under this program, teachers, principals or administrators agree to work several hours behind the counter on a designated day and their school gets 20 to 25 percent of the restaurant's receipts for the time worked. This program has brought about $500,000 into school coffers each year.
Is this willingness to help the community by sharing the growing costs of education? Or ploys to lure and sway a captive audience at a tender age?
The debate is steadily heating up along with the price tags and potential profits, especially in North America, where advertisers have been most experimental. But as the battle lines harden, a few grassroots groups have won some high-profile skirmishes recently.
Los Angeles, one of the largest U.S. school districts, decided last autumn to kick out Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and other soft drinks from their schools. This means that more than 700,000 students in the second-largest U.S. school district will soon find only water, juice, milk and sports drinks in vending machines.
Meanwhile, Channel One in the United States and the Youth News Network in Canada, television ventures that run news programs laced with advertising in schools in exchange for providing equipment, are being expelled from a growing list of U.S. school districts and Canadian provinces.
"This is a grassroots issue that is growing and reaching critical mass right now because marketers have more ways of reaching children than ever before," said Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of a group called Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children. "It is everywhere. In the U.S., kids see 40,000 commercials a year on TV alone."
(p 19:) One of the most far-reaching rebellions is happening in Seattle where Brita Butler-Wall, a mother of two and president of a Parent-Teacher's Association, started a movement with a half dozen friends six years ago that now has a database of 2,000 members and 40 organizational allies, including unions, political parties, neighborhood groups, churches and associations of farmers and medical workers.
"Our school district had decided to sell advertising space on the school walls because they were in a budget crisis, so I talked to some other parents and we decided to go to the mat," said Butler-Wall, executive director of the Citizen's Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools.
After several years of activity, the group succeeded 15 months ago in passing one of the country's most restrictive advertising policies in the Seattle school district. It has since expanded its activities to 120 communities in the state of Washington and is now aiming for statewide legislation.
"We're all volunteers, so we don't have the resources of the Coca-Cola Co.," she said. "But we find that people are outraged when they find out what is actually going on in schools. Coke and Pepsi are looking kind of lonely."
The new challenge for school administrators in the last decade, especially in North America, is that they are under attack from two directions. On the one hand, budgets are being steadily cut while, on the other, performance standards are being ratcheted up. The resulting mismatch between costs and resources, due in no small part to a series of U.S. taxpayer rebellions over the last decade, has driven many administrators to a creeping dependence on the private sector.
"When parents are exhausted with going door-to-door to raise funds and then when a company shows up claiming it wants to give back to a community by helping out the local school, who's going to say no?" said Erika Shaker, a specialist in education financing at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa.
Corporate officials emphasize the idea of giving back in campaigns ranging from the extensive reading programs run by Coca-Cola Co. to the "adopt-a-school" initiatives of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer. Under this program, the managers of a Wal-Mart store ask a local school what it needs and then offer funds for items ranging from books for libraries to playground construction and breakfast programs.
"People tell us that there are many things they wouldn't be able to buy for their schools without the money from McTeacher's Nights," said Steve Tompos, director of communications for McDonald's division for the Western United States in San Diego. "Our owner/operators are local business people and know the needs of their communities."
At stake are not only funds for athletic teams and school trips, which have traditionally had commercial backing in communities, but increasingly for essentials such as textbooks and libraries. The squeeze on school resources is getting so serious that some needy Canadian districts, notably in Nova Scotia, have sanctioned "P3" agreements ("public/private partnerships") in which the private sector funds the construction of schools.
One of the most interesting battlegrounds is over technology, a sector in which many governments have formed partnerships with leading companies at the highest levels to keep expensive and rapidly changing equipment available to schools. The symbiosis here gives pause even to many critics because some companies may fashion better technology and a better workforce through the expanded contact even though they may be implanting their logo in the minds of future buyers.
Germany, for example, which has fairly strict standards regarding corporate visibility in the classroom in general, is one of the countries that makes a special case for technology. Its D21 program, launched three years ago, is a wide-ranging arrangement between the public and private sectors that involves several hundred companies and is geared toward bringing schools and other institutions up-to-date with computer technology.
Here as well, however, advocates of a hands-off policy believe that communities should be giving all schools equal access to all equipment rather than allowing corporate agendas to play a role.
"If they want to provide money, they should be paying their share of taxes, and then people who we elect will decide how to spend that money," said Butler-Wall.
"We all suffer or we all benefit if children are treated fairly," said Alex Molnar, director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. "A market, by definition, can't address issues of equity."
Some organizations have gone a step beyond criticizing commercialism and have tried to train children at an early age to recognize commercials as efforts to sell.
Rhoda Karpatkin, a former president of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports based in Yonkers, New York, launched a magazine called Zillions that worked "to compete with the commercials for the hearts and minds of children and tried to make them more sophisticated judges of the sales messages they're dealing with all the time." The magazine, which was published from 1980 to 2002, "was a moral and literary success but not a financial one," she said.
Molnar and others see a showdown eventually taking place in court somewhere in the United States. "Currently in the U.S., there is no overarching legislation to protect children from advertising," said Molnar. "If just one state banned marketing in schools, it would have enormous impact. The law would likely be immediately subjected to a constitutional test. But I think the Supreme Court would uphold the law creating momentum for a new national policy."
"The most potent anti-commercialism momentum at the moment is in the area of selling junk food and soft drinks," he added. "It's hard to argue for such sales in light of the government's own research on obesity and diabetes."
Butler-Wall said, "I think it is child abuse to encourage kids through your own school to eat unhealthy food, fully knowing what the risks are, and especially with the surgeon general's report on diabetes."
While developed countries in Asia and Europe tend to have traditions that muffle corporate presence in the classroom, the commercial advance is gaining ground there as well, especially since education nearly everywhere is primarily funded locally. This means some areas are challenged and vulnerable to the commercial techniques that have been fine-tuned in North America.
"Even though some local communities are not so well off and there are complaints, this is not really such a topic here," said Florian Frank, spokesman for the German Ministry for Education and Research. "Corporations are not allowed to do many things, but they also would not even think of trying to do them because it is not part of our long-time traditions."
Activists on both sides of the Atlantic nearly always point to Sweden as their model. Stockholm has banned all advertising directed at children under the age of 12 on all television and radio channels under the country's jurisdiction and has been actively lobbying in Brussels to get the European Union to adopt the same policy.
Rick Smith is a free-lance journalist based in Paris.