The District School Board of Colorado, for example, now generates average annual revenues of $100,000 from advertising in its school system. Having negotiated advertising rights for space on school buses, it earns $12,000 per vehicle. Signs are worth $1,500 for one that is 2 x 5 feet and placed inside the building. The district's biggest and most lucrative arrangement is a 1997 deal signed with Coke that will net board $8.4 million over ten years. If all schools in the system sell more than 70,000 cases of Coke products in a year, then the board can earn a bonus from the company.
 

By age 20, the average American has seen one million TV commercials

  Because different countries - and even different regions within one country - implement education policies based on their own values and political commitments to public funding, this American trend toward commercialization may not seem immediately relevant to district trustees in Europe, Canada, Australia or Israel. However, the factors that are combining to change education and force difficult funding decisions in the US could emerge elsewhere. In a world of global commerce, marketing strategists at multinational toy, clothing and snack food companies are adept at exporting successful ideas and campaigns from one market to another, and if they can, they will pursue these types partnerships globally. The youth demographic is that powerful. Secondly, no government or jurisdiction is immune to the possibility of budget restraints and the choices those can force.
  Along with concerns about exploiting the conditions of learning, concerned parent groups (such as those organized in San Francisco and Seattle) have said that they feel children are already overloaded with commercial messages outside the school. For example, according to research by American Demographics, the average American has already seen, by the age of 20, one million TV commercials, and adolescents aged 12 to 19 are responsible for $141 billion in direct economic spending. These parents also raise questions about privacy protection when they see the commercial Internet providers entering the classroom: companies are very interested in tracking the spending habits and tastes of youth.
  For every parent group that objects to commercial messages in the classroom, there are scores of other teachers and parents who are happy to see their under-funded schools receive new resources. For example, the Colorado Springs Education Association, the teachers' union in Colorado, did not receive any complaints from teachers or parents over any aspect of the district's program. In fact, many other school districts in the US have approached the Colorado administrators in order to learn how to replicate their model. Exclusive soft drink programs are growing, and Coke or Pepsi have already signed deals with boards across the country. For example, Pepsi gave $1.5 million to Jefferson County to help build a new sports stadium.

Channel One in the US requires that for every ten minutes of broadcast content, students must watch two minutes of ads

Who's Interested in School-Business Partnerships?
  The following are a sample of companies working to define and promote school-business partnerships in North America.
  Channel One is probably the best-known in-school marketing program in the USA. As a private company, it sells educational news programming to eight million students at 12,000 schools, which comprise 40 percent of all American schools. For ten minutes of broadcasting content, students must watch two minutes of ads. In exchange, the company lends an estimated $30,000 worth of television and video equipment to each school. This equipment transmits daily programming from Channel One's broadcast center, but schools are entitled to use it for other purposes during the day, a selling feature that helps entice many to sign up. Channel One offers other content, such as instructional videos dealing with science and other curriculum, and professional development topics for teachers. Over the years, the commercials have promoted snack foods, personal care products, movies, clothes, and electronic products.
  Channel One has received a great deal of critical media coverage because it brings TV commercials directly into the classroom. However, the company has undertaken formal studies to demonstrate that its format is popular with teachers, who receive ready-made teaching material for lessons every day. According to a study prepared in the mid-1990s by the Institute for Social Research using data gathered by the company, teachers say they found value in the news shows because they were catered especially for students. Surveys were distributed to all teachers at the participating schools and a "clear majority" said they were satisfied with the Channel One programming and equipment, while less than 10% were dissatisfied with the programming. Two-thirds of the teachers said that they would "strongly" or "very strongly" recommend it.
  Supporters say that programming like Channel One could not be produced by government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Education, and quasi-governmental agencies like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because it is prohibitively expensive. Total start-up costs for equipment are $350 million, and annual costs for production and distribution of the programming are roughly $12 million. Another $15 million is needed for maintenance of the equipment and purchase of the video for the Classroom Channel. Critics assert that other ways of teaching media are possible and may be more productive.
  ZapMe! offers schools thousands of dollars' worth of free computer equipment in exchange for the right to display a constant stream of advertisements to students on the computer screens. The free hardware each school receives includes a satellite dish, fifteen state-of-the-art personal computers, a furnished computer lab and high-speed Internet access computers. Since its launch in 1998, 5,000 schools have signed up for the ZapMe! service, with another 8,000 expressing interest. The company has set up full computer labs at ninety schools in eleven states. As part of the terms of engagement, participating schools must promise that the system will be used for at least four hours per school day. When students log on, they gain access to about 10,000 educational sites chosen and reviewed by ZapMe!, but the sites can be viewed only through the company's "Netspace," a bordered frame containing a constantly rotating series of ads. Through the company's "dynamic billboards", simple mouse clicks can take the viewer directly to a corporate advertiser's homepage or to a video advertising a product.
  ZapMe! refuses advertisements for tobacco, alcohol or other products considered harmful to children. Company executives insist that most of ZapMe!'s advertisements will be public service announcements, with one-third of on-screen ads representing "corporate consumer" ads that sell branded products. Taking advantage of the two-way nature of the Internet, the company uses its permission to monitor students' Web-browsing habits and tracks information such as age, sex and ZIP code. This data is provided to advertisers so they can better target kids' interests. ZapMe! promises not to disclose personal information about any specific user.
  Highwired.Net, a Massachusetts-based technology company, helps create Web sites for student newspapers around the country, then fills them with ads for a variety of clients.
  ScreenAd Digital Billboards is a Canadian company that installs screen savers with a rotating set of advertisements on students' computers.
  Teen People magazine has built a network of 8,000 "Trendspotters," unpaid teen volunteers from around the US who monitor cultural "hot buttons" and report teenage tastes and trends to magazine representatives through focus groups, surveys and interviews. Although not a direct school-business partnership, Teen People uses its network to track adolescent behaviour in schools. These kids are deemed "influencers" who help companies predict what trends are going to hit the mainstream. Through the Teen People Web site on AOL, another 300 "cyber informants" also keep ahead of what to do and see on the Internet. Since launching publication two years ago, simultaneously with its Internet site, Teen People has reached a circulation of 1.5 million.

Options for Concerned Parents

• Teach children when they are in elementary school different ways to respond to advertising. Companies rely on marketing psychologists to learn how to influence children, so parents must teach their children to think critically about what they see. Starting when your child is in elementary school, talk critically about commercials as you watch them together, asking questions that teach them to analyze the images and messages. "How do companies make their product look so appealing?" For example, point out the fact that the people they see are actors and models who are groomed by professional make-up artists and hair stylists to sell personal care products like soap, shampoo, nail polish, etc. "Do TV ads appeal to your emotions or to your good judgment?" Talk about the power of high profile stars in advertising: "Does Tiger Woods wear Nike clothes because they help his golf game, or because he makes more money from his sponsorships than he does from winning on the pro circuit?"

• Govern your own use of media in the home: refrain from using the television and video games as baby sitters.

• When it's time to exchange gifts for holidays or birthdays, talk to your child about the value of making something original rather than buying a present in a mall. Emphasize that spending more thought and energy on something small and personal is better than spending a lot of money. Describe the significance of personal connections created through gifts: show something cherished but simple that you kept from childhood because it came from someone you love.

• Join or start a group to lobby your provincial or state government for legislation that limits the kind of contracts that school boards can sign with technology companies or corporate advertisers. Insist on terms that require education decision-makers to hold public hearings in order to prove that proposed deals represent "integral components" of a student's education. If corporate funding is going to be accepted, demand "walls of separation" between schools and businesses - corporate partnership arrangements that allow businesses to support educational endeavors but for which they receive no advertising rights. In San Francisco, the Board of Education approved the Commercial Free Schools Act, the first measure of its kind in the US. The act bars the district from signing exclusive beverage contracts or adopting educational materials that contain corporate logos. Teachers cannot use textbooks or other materials with brand-name advertising.

• Approach educational organizations and obtain their voluntary guidelines they create to help schools determine which, if any, in-school commercial activities have merit.

• If you are concerned with the level of commercialism in your child's classrooms, organize a "commercialism walk-through" of the city's schools with a PTA group or another parents' group. Appoint a school-community task force to study the issue and make policy recommendations and restrict the forms of commercial activities. Collect as many examples of existing commercial material as possible and send a copy of the findings to the school board. Parents in Seattle took these steps as part of the Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-free Schools (CCC). After a series of public meetings, they forced the school board to rescind the advertising sponsorship policy.

  The question of public funding for education - and the benefits of commercial-free schools - is in danger of disappearing. One risk of allowing private money to pay for education in exchange for advertising opportunities is dependence: it can lead the public to forget the days when there were no commercial messages in school. Administrators may become accustomed to corporate money and abandon efforts to lobby government bodies for adequate public funding.

Paul Pellizzari is author of Ethics in a Grocery Cart (EthicScan, 1998) and co-author of Shopping with a Conscience (Wiley, 1996), two books on corporate social responsibility. He is the editor for theinvolvedfather.com (an on-line parenting magazine), a regular columnist for the Corporate Ethics Monitor, and a contributor of freelance articles on a variety of issues dealing with business's effects on society. From 1995 to 2000, he was director of research at EthicScan Canada.

Posted: April 02, 2001