By: Pat Daley
Your child comes home from school and tells you everyone in the class has started to keep a "My All About Me Journal." You think it's great that the young ones are thinking about themselves and the people around them - and writing it down.
But the journal never comes home for you to see. Instead, the 27-page booklet goes back to the cable company that designed it as a marketing survey.
It happened in a New Jersey elementary school. And similar market research activities are starting to take place in Canadian classrooms.
In the U.S., the Consumers Union is supporting a bill before Congress that would require parents to consent before market research could be conducted in the classroom. The Student Privacy Protection Act also calls on the Comptroller General to conduct a national study on the prevalence and effect of commercial activity in the classroom.
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"We're being told we can no longer expect or afford commercial-free classrooms." - Erica Shaker, CCPA Education Project |
The New Jersey experience is just one example. In a Massachusetts elementary school, kids spent two days tasting cereal and answering an opinion survey. Could it happen here?
"Absolutely," says Erika Shaker of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Education Project. "It will happen more and more because schools have less and less money." Requiring parental consent is just a symptom of the problem, not a solution, she says.
Parents and community members have already raised the alarm about school boards that give exclusive beverage contracts to soft drink companies. Likewise, there has been an ongoing campaign in a number of Canadian provinces against Youth News Network (YNN).
YNN is a Canadian company that provides secondary schools with high-tech audio-visual equipment, including distance learning centres. In return, students are expected to watch a daily 10-minute news and current affairs program, produced by YNN and - just like real TV - replete with commercials. It's the commercials that make money for YNN.
Actually conducting market research seems to be the next step in the commercialization of classrooms. Bob Reynolds, president of Education Market Resources (EMR), says while his company's main business is in the U.S., it's also operating in some Canadian and Mexican schools.
EMR pays schools that allow it into classrooms, primarily through the use of on-line surveys.
"Through our exclusive Kidsay system, we help America's leading companies and brands create a better world for our children," says the six-year-old company's web site. Tia-Maria Smith, Senior Research Manager in the Gatorade Division of Quaker Oats is willing to testify to that.
"The fact that they access those kids in the schools, where they are most comfortable, is something that no other supplier offers," she says on the EMR home page.
Besides surveys, the company uses Internet panels, mock shopping, focus groups, and play sessions. If your child has opinions but is too young for school, don't worry. "Pre-school children can be tested with or without their mom present," the web site says.
Why is this happening? EMR has an answer to that question, too. "EMR has provided our school a relatively simple way to make large sums of money. As a principal of an elementary school there never seems to be enough of that 'green stuff,'" says another testimonial.
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Depending on the research client - ranging from Kentucky Fried Chicken to a government nutrition project - schools can make from the hundreds of dollars to thousands |
It's a win-win situation as far as Bob Reynolds is concerned.
"A lot of companies are trying to get signage in schools," he says. "We're strictly researchers. We never go into a school unless invited. We won't talk to any students without their parents' permission." Depending on the research client - ranging from Kentucky Fried Chicken to a government nutrition project - schools can make from the hundreds of dollars to thousands.
Reynolds says EMR strongly supports the Student Privacy Protection Act introduced by Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California. David Madland, a staffer in Miller's office, says of all the market research firms who said they ask for parental permission before doing business in schools, EMR was the only one that actually faxed a copy of their permission form to the congressman's office.
Nevertheless, Madland said there's one point Miller always makes: "If we were properly funding schools, we wouldn't have to resort to this [legislation]."
Erika Shaker would agree. "We're being told we can no longer expect or afford commercial-free classrooms," she says. But does that matter in a world where advertising seems to be everywhere?
It certainly matters to companies that want to get their piece of all the disposable income kids have - or that they can convince their parents to part with. Toronto will host two conferences this summer on marketing to kids. Marketers can attend Kid Power 2000 Canada for two days in June for fees ranging from $1,800 to about $2,700 depending on how many workshops they take in. In May, Understanding Youth 2000 will look at marketing to tweens, teens and young adults. Topics include "Billion($) of reasons to reach the Ne(x)t Generation" and "Education and Marketing."
Shaker says it matters for an even bigger reason.
"We have to realize public education is not free. Classroom time is not free," she says. "To turn it over to the private sector as if we owe them something is a gross misunderstanding of who owns the classroom." When schools start relying on outside money - whether it comes from selling chocolate bars or letting in market researchers - we get an education system that's enhanced based on the wealth of the local community, she says. And that means the destruction of equitable public education.
Pat Daley is a freelance writer and editor in Athlone in Simcoe County, Ontario.
Get More/Do More
The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education - www.commercialfree.org
Corporate Watch: Commercialism in the Classroom - www.corpwatch.org/trac/ feature/education/commercial
Commercial Alert - www.essential.org/alert
Canadian Teachers Federation: Public Education and the Private Sector - www.ctf-fce.ca/E/WHAT/NI/public.htm
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