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Schools Succumbing to the Grip of Globalised Business Schools are being encouraged to form partnerships with businesses. It is seen as a possible answer to their financial woes, while businesses argue that they are merely providing a needed service to communities which are either unwilling or unable to help the schools. They also claim that it is all part of a trend to increase the business community's ties to local education. Some even claim more noble motives: Collector schemes, for instance, a system whereby pupils who buy certain goods are rewarded with tokens or vouchers which can be exchanged for school materials such as computers, can apparently provide schools, parents and communities with a sense of purpose, argue companies. However, big multinationals are not investing in schools out of any philanthropic urge. The idea of a captive market of school students to whom they can feed a constant diet of corporate advertising is a particularly attractive one, and one which has spawned a variety of marketing methods. These methods include: Soft drink "pouring rights" agreements; logos on vending machines, supplies and sports facilities; hallway advertising; advertisements on school buses, sports uniforms and scoreboards; contests; free samples; coupons for fast food; club and activity sponsorship; sponsorship of school sports and other events; and, finally, teaching materials. Eating habits and sponsorship One increasing area of concern today over school children is the food that they eat. This problem has been exacerbated by the growth of fast food consumption among the younger generation. So much so in fact that in the USA a diet of cheeseburgers and sodas is now being blamed for the three-fold increase in child obesity in the past 30 years. Nutritionists and public health campaigners are now saying the incursion of junk food into America's public schools markets is irresponsible. Schoolchildren are a captive audience and companies' strategies contribute directly to the obesity pandemic which is now also beginning to tax the health care system to the limits. This is worrying in a country where 60 per cent of the adult population is already overweight. This diet, however, is literally being pushed on school children in the USA, and in Europe too the very same strategies are gradually becoming just as widespread. The food industry has been able to exert a huge influence on children's choice of food. Most of the big US fast food chains and fizzy drink businesses have targeted American schools. McDonalds and Burger King have set up kiosks in schools; Pizza Hut operates in 4,000 American schools, 20,000 schools are involved in Taco Bell's "frozen burrito product line" and Subway supplies sandwiches to nearly 800 schools. Sponsorship deals with food companies are now worth an estimated $750 million (£536 million) annually to American schools, and PepsiCo, for example, has said explicitly that its strategy is to push to expand soft drink consumption among children aged six to 11. PepsiCo has been successful but faces huge competition and the fight for future loyal customers is on. Indeed, creating loyalty among young people is seen as well worth the effort. After all, such people have a lifetime of soft drink purchases ahead of them. As Marion Nestle already wrote in 2000, School districts in Colorado, Ohio, and Texas, for example, have contracted with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper, respectively, for pouring rights worth millions of dollars; larger school districts have auctioned their rights to the highest bidder; and other school districts have hired consultants to help them negotiate the best deals with soft drink companies. In the benchmark "deal," a 53-school Colorado district relinquished its Pepsi vending machines when it signed an $8 million, 10-year agreement with Coca-Cola that included cash bonuses for exceeding sales targets, i.e. teachers are expected to encourage pupils to purchase soft drinks. The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, an advocacy organization in Oakland, California, reports that more than 100 districts or schools have signed exclusive contracts with Coke or Pepsi at a cost of more than $100 million to the companies, and that the number of such contracts doubled just in the last half of 1999.The contracts provide sports, arts, or computer facilities not otherwise available from state or local resources. The stranglehold is there and cash-strapped schools admit that the money often allows them to buy much-needed sporting and computer facilities, but of course comes with strings attached. "Pouring rights" contracts with soft-drink makers specify, for instance, numbers and placements of vending machines in schools, often even tying sponsorship levels to sales quotas. Many North American schools boards have already signed over exclusive rights to either Pepsi or Coke allowing them exclusive vending rights on site in exchange for a lump sum from the company. The deal varies from school to school, but in her book No Logo, Naomi Klein provides a few examples of this type of sponsorship: • In Toronto, Pepsi is allowed to fill the 560 public schools with its vending machines, to block the sales of Coke and other competitors, and to distribute "Pepsi Achievement Awards" and other goods displaying its logo. In communities like Cayuga, a rural Ontario tobacco-farming town, Pepsi buys the right to brand entire schools. "Pepsi - Official Soft Drink of Cayuga Secondary School" reads the giant sign beside the road. At South Fork High School in Florida, there is a blunt, hard-sell arrangement: the school has a clause in its Pepsi contract committing the school to "make its best effort to maximize all sales opportunities for Pepsi-Cola products". Teaching materials Corporate sponsorship also extends to teaching materials such as text books. In the US, in Australia, in Britain and increasingly elsewhere, school education receives inadequate government funding and teachers have few teaching resources available to help them outside of what is offered by corporate and trade interests. Some say that corporations are "taking advantage of schools short on funds." At the very least corporate sponsorship of school resources enables the underfunding of schools by governments to continue. A 1998 survey by the Consumers' Union in America concluded that 80 per cent of such materials was biased in ways which promoted the sponsors' views or products. In the following, two examples are cited, but the list of examples is endless: • Procter and Gamble, the manufacturer of many common household items from toothpaste to laundry detergents, has produced a variety of educational packages including "Decision Earth", which was distributed to almost 75 000 schools in the US. "Decision Earth" contained some highly controversial claims on waste disposal, mining and forestry issues. For example, Procter and Gamble argued in their package that disposable diapers are no worse for the environment than cloth diapers, a claim based on scientific studies funded by Procter and Gamble. The company just happens to be the world's largest manufacturer of disposable nappies although this wasn't mentioned in the package. The "models" in America are fast finding their feet in Europe. In some parts of the UK, McDonalds already provide textbooks, which are full of advertising, to hard-up schools, Cadburys have a "World of Chocolate" resource pack for children, which has been harshly criticised for sending mixed messages on nutrition and health, and Walkers, Nestle, Pringles and McVities all offer books and equipment in return for vouchers. The potential to shape young people's perceptions in a way that is more favourable to corporations has attracted many corporate and industry customers to the firms designing educational materials. As a result, teachers in the US are being overwhelmed with free and unsolicited curriculum material from public relations firms, corporations and industry associations. Each year hundreds of thousands of teachers in the US attend workshops run by corporations in conjunction with their educational materials. As Sharon Beder, in her book Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism says, these materials are sent directly to teachers, by-passing official curriculum review committees, so that they are not subject to any scrutiny apart from individual teachers who may not be able to judge the accuracy or bias in the materials. And, unfortunately, a teacher's use of a sponsor's materials or products also automatically implies an endorsement. Beder goes on to discuss the example of Lifetime Learning Systems, one of the companies which compiles educational materials on behalf of corporations and trade associations. It services more than 350 corporations in the US alone, as well as associations such as the American Nuclear Society, and claims to reach almost one hundred percent of US schools - 63 million young people every year. According to Lifetime Learning Systems promotional literature: "Let Lifetime Learning Systems bring your message to the classroom, where young people are forming attitudes that will last a lifetime. Coming from school, all these materials carry an extra measure of credibility that gives your message added weight. IMAGINE millions of students discussing your product in class. IMAGINE their teachers presenting your organization's point of view." The materials and learning packages produced by companies like Lifetime Learning Systems are professionally produced with lots of colour and games, prepared homework assignments and even computers that automatically grade the students work. They are generally offered for free and are hard for teachers to resist, particularly those from poorly resourced schools. The Consumers Union in the USA found that nearly 80 per cent of the sponsored educational materials it analysed "contained biased or incomplete information, promoting a viewpoint that favors consumption of the sponsor's product or service or a position that favors the company or its economic agenda." It concluded that the commercialisation of education, arising from advertisements and sponsored educational material containing "biased, self-serving and promotional information," posed a "significant and growing threat to the integrity of education in America." Sports sponsorship Predictably Nike, Reebok, Adidas and the rest offer sponsorship to school sports teams and facilities, but it now no longer ends there. Already in 1997-98 children at more than 800 elementary schools in the USA sat at their desks to learn all about the fascinating world of creating Nike trainers. All the information came from a corporate publicity pack. The American National Education Association called it "a despicable use of classroom time" and the US Consumers' Union said that it was a "warping of education". Television Schools TV, like Channel One in America or Youth News Network in Canada, are a further means of marketing to children. These TV channels offer schools current affairs programming for children sandwiched around ads. The deal is that the ads are compulsory viewing and the volume of the broadcast cannot be adjusted, so the ads cannot be turned off. The schools gain no money from the stations but they are allowed to use the audiovisual equipment for other lessons. This medium is naturally a powerful one in countries like the USA where three-quarters of children aged between five and 16 have TVs in their bedrooms and 85% play video games. It has been calculated that the average 10-year-old there has already memorised 300 to 400 brands. The moral of the story Education is fast on its way to becoming just another corporate opportunity, another marketing niche for globalized business. If public schools were funded adequately, the blatant commercialism such schools face would almost certainly be subjected to greater scrutiny, and departments of education, school boards, principals, and coaches would be less likely to enter into agreements with companies without far more public debate than is now the case. As one American school board official explained, "education cannot be funded by potato chip contracts ... come back and talk to me about nothing being wrong with these contracts when there are Coca-Cola banners in the American House of Representatives." Sponsoring contracts may solve immediate problems of school funding but their social cost is high, not least because they undermine efforts to establish adequate government and local funding for public education. Schools should be a public space in which the first and last objective is the broadest possible education of our children. And, compared to what the schools give up, which is their public-service mission and moral standing, the money they are receiving is simply not worth the paper it is printed on. If more resources are required for schools (and they are), then governments should ensure that these are made available rather than sell their souls, and above all the souls of their and our children, to the multinationals.
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