The recent news that McGraw-Hill Inc. had published an elementary-school math textbook full of brand names shocked some parents, but it didn't shock anyone who has been keeping a close eye on American education.
The math book -- with its references to Nike, Gatorade and Sony Play Stations -- is hardly the most egregious example of commercialism infiltrating schools.McGraw-Hill says that it did not receive any payment for including the brand names. But this only shows how reflexively many educators have accepted the idea that schoolchildren are consumers-in-training.
Eager to attract a captive audience of young customers, marketers are showering public schools with advertising and hucksterism. Dozens of large corporations such as Exxon and McDonald's now sponsor a wide variety of in-school marketing projects.
Some companies pay school districts to get posters touting their products displayed on school buses and in cafeterias or sponsor educational programs in exchange for advertising space. Others create curricular materials, such as an exercise book that purports to teach third-graders math by having them count Tootsie Rolls.
Many cash-strapped schools find it hard to resist these free publications. And state laws requiring the screening of textbooks do not cover the corporate-sponsored handouts.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi have turned some schools into virtual sales agents for their products. Districts across the country have signed multimillion-dollar "pouring rights" contracts, which give a soft-drink company exclusive permission to distribute its products in schools.
The rush to get computers into classrooms has opened up new commercial possibilities. Zap Me, a Silicon Valley company, gives schools free personal computers and Internet access in exchange for the right to display a constant stream of on-screen advertisements. Participating schools must also promise that the systems will be in use for at least four hours per school day.
This onslaught raises fundamental issues of public policy, curriculum content, the proper relationship of educators to students and the values that schools embody. Yet few parents are aware of just how much commercial material exists in their children's schools, and fewer still have a voice in deciding whether it should be there at all.
In Seattle, however, parents organized a series of "commercialism walk-throughs" of the city's schools, collecting as many examples of commercial material as they could. Their findings helped stop a proposed districtwide policy that would have allowed corporate advertising in schools and led to the formation of a school/community task force to study the issue.
Public officials, too, have begun to address the problem. A member of the California Assembly has introduced bills that would ban commercial logos and brand names in state-endorsed textbooks and prohibit school districts from signing exclusive marketing contracts that require in-school advertising.
Still, in the battle over commercial access to schools, it is corporations that have the upper hand. Unless more parents, teachers and politicians start paying attention, consumerism may replace learning as the predominant value in American public education.
Steven Manning is a research fellow at the New York-based Open Society Institute.