Plugging products in class: hard selling to soft targets

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 12, 1995 | by Stephen Goode, | J. Jennings Moss

Advertising is everywhere in America's schools: on wallboards in corridors, on radio programs piped into lunchrooms and in teaching kits, videos, software, posters and a variety of other "educational materials" paid for by corporations - and carrying their logos. While advertising is a valuable source of money for hard-pressed schools, and corporate-sponsored materials can be a godsend to districts reeling from budget cut-backs, some educators are questioning the wisdom of opening the classroom to often-blatant commercialism: Do the benefits of ad money outweigh the propaganda behind it?

Captive Kids, a new report on "commercial pressures on kids at school" from Consumers Union of Yonkers, N.Y, has some troubling answers to such questions. Parents need to know that the schools "are turning kids into salespeople," says Charlotte Baecher, editor of Zillions, a magazine published by Consumers Union "to help 8- to 14-year-olds evaluate the products being pitched to them." (Consumers Reports.) "Youngsters come home, saying, `Mommy I need this' to which Mommy finds herself saying no!" says Baecher, also director of Consumers Union education services.

Some education advocates, such as the National Education Association, oppose all "commercialism which forces students to observe, listen to or read advertising" but welcome "meaningful and noncommercial partnerships between business and education." Others, such as National Association of State Boards of Education, have no formal position on the issue but support a case-by-case approach with local education and business leaders working out details.

Classrooms offer advertisers a huge captive market: 43 million young people are enrolled in American schools, and teenagers alone spend more than $57 billion yearly on food, clothing, soft drinks, toys and games. Elementary pupils spend another $11 billion.

According to Baecher, many advertisers target schools in poorer areas - schools that are most in need of the aid offered by big corporations and "intensifying the differences between the rich and the poor," another criticism leveled by those opposed to advertising in the schools.

But most school districts are vulnerable to the lure of financial assistance that advertising offers, according to the report. A decade ago, a teacher might have a budget of $400 or $500 to buy posters, photo packets and other supplementary materials; today, a teacher may have little or no funds for such purchases and must seek them elsewhere. Some teachers pay for them out of their own pockets, notes Captive Kids.

The report does not condemn all advertising. 5A Day Adventures, a CD-ROM produced by Interactive Design & Development Inc. for Dole Foods is singled out for praise as "unbiased and not commercial." ChemCom: Chemistry in the Community ChemTV, developed by the American Chemical Society for Dow Chemical Co., is commended as "objective and not commercial." Chemcom includes a video, a 222-page student supplement and a 103-page teacher's guide.

Many other programs fall short of Consumers Union standards, however, especially materials focusing on nutrition or the environment. The American Egg Board, an advocacy group that produced The Incredible Journey From Hen to Home for grades four through six, earned the broadside "highly commercial and incomplete with strong bias toward eggs." The Polystyrene Packaging Council's The Plastics and the Environment Source-book also is denounced as "highly commercial" and biased because it fails to mention that most plastics aren't recyclable.

Interestingly, what Captive Kids regards as flaws are not always apparent to other observers. The report labels Photo Pals, a program developed by Fuji Photo Film Co., highly commercial, but the same program is deemed worthy by many teachers who say it inspires their students to be creative and become involved in classroom activities, according to Ernest Fleishman, senior vice president and director of education for the New York City-based Scholastic Inc., a major publisher of educational software, magazines and films.

What to do? According to Consumers Union's Baecher, "Schools themselves must be more stringent about evaluating materials." But Fleishman, who was superintendent of schools in Greenwich, Conn., before joining Scholastic, notes that school boards already have their hands full monitoring textbooks and other materials. There's no time to examine the flood of offerings from corporations. "I think the teacher is able to make the distinction [between what's good and what's bad] to see if the product serves a genuine education need and if not, throw it away," he says.

Corporations also can act more responsibly, says Mary Guy Miller, founder of Interactive Design & Development. "Dole really did take my advice ... not to be commercial," she says. 5 A Day Adventures carries the Dole logo on the disc and at the beginning of the program. But Miller, who taught sixth- and seventh-graders before founding Interactive in 1991, talked with teachers before creating characters such as Stuart Spinach and Pamela Pineapple, who hold forth on nutrition and sing songs written by Miller's group. Young viewers are offered an electronic-mail address to obtain more information about foods that interest them.