Corporate Advertising: Not the Solution to Funding Woes

Public K-12 schools all over the country are suffering from economic problems, from budget cuts to funding mismanagement. President Obama’s new budget calls for an overhaul of the Department of Education and No Child Left Behind in the hopes of re-imagining how education is funded. But while waiting for the new budget's proposed $3 billion funding increase, cash-strapped school districts are taking matters into their own hands.

The San Diego Unified School District is considering corporate advertising on school lunch tables, banners, and buildings, hoping to bring in $500,000 of revenue. In Washington state, legislators are considering a proposal to allow advertising on and in school buses. And in Chicago’s Maine Township High School, students protested potential teacher layoffs by offering suggestions on how to increase revenue: Place a giant Nike logo on the school roof and allow local businesses to advertise on in-school televisions.

Seems like a common-sense, all-American-apple-pie solution to the problem. After all, kids these days see advertisements 24/7 anyway -- what's the big deal?

For twelve years, the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University has published reports on commercialism trends in schools. And the news is not good. As channels of marketing and advertising directed at kids multiply, so do the messages of consumer-based values. The most recent report, Click: The Twelfth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2008-2009, states that schools which allow marketing and advertising are also subtly supporting consumerist values, which "include the benefits and positive virtues of free market capitalism, overconsumption, the normalcy of debt, and hypersexuality."

At best, advertising aimed at kids and teens takes advantage of their underdeveloped reasoning skills and age-defined insecurities. We already know that materialism is linked to childhood depression, anxiety, and lower self-esteem, and that exposure to advertising is linked to family discord.

And, as author Naomi Klein points out in Captive Audience: Advertising Invades the Classroom, education and advertising do not share the same values. "One is asking students to look deeper to find their own answers, one is providing constant easy answers and solutions and usually that solution involves buying something."

Schools are for teaching and learning. Not for manufacturing new consumers. It should be the one place where kids are free of corporate influence.

Photo credit: jesse.millan