Pizza Hut, Domino's, and the Public Schools: Making Sense of Commercialization.

Making Sense of Commercialization LOS ANGELES-BASED Tooned-In Menu Team, Inc., prints 4 million menus each month for school cafeterias around the country, each one laden with ads for products such as Pillsbury cookies or Pokemon. The deal is this: In exchange for getting their menus done up for free, participating schools provide Tooned-In with a ready market for its advertisers. It's just one of a proliferating number of arrangements forged each year between schools (or school boards) and companies. Consider McDonald's All-American Reading Challenge, in which McDonald's gives hamburger coupons to elementary-school students in exchange for their reading a certain number of books. Or Piggly Wiggly's offer to donate money to a school in return for sales receipts--indicating proof of purchase at the store--from the school community. Or the American Egg Board's "Incredible Journey from Hen to Home" curricular material, which is provided to schools for free while also promoting egg consumption. Or ZapMe! , which furnishes schools with free computer labs in return for the opportunity to run kid-oriented banner ads on the installed browsers and collect aggregate demographic information on students' web-surfing habits. In each case, the school gets something -- money, equipment, incentives for kids to learn, curricular material -- at a time of shrinking public-education budgets. And the companies also get something: access to a lucrative market. American teenagers spend $57 billion of their own money annually while influencing family expenditures of $200 billion more. As important, these commercial deals enable companies to build brand loyalty in a new generation of consumers. That is why the term "commercialism in the schools," with its controversial connotations, never gets applied to the sorts of universally praised deals -- such as company-sponsored scholarship, internship, or training programs -- in which companies treat students not as future consumers but as future employees. And indeed commercialism in the schools is controversial; it attracts fierce criticism. National organizations such as the Yonkers-based Consumers Union or Oakland's Center for Commercial Free Public Education -- as well as numerous ad hoc parental movements at the local level -- have taken up arms against commercial deals, battling companies in school board hearings and courtrooms. Their concerns: that commercial deals cede control of the education agenda to nonteachers, that they prey upon a captive audience, that they distort kids' and families' consumer choices, that they foster materialistic values, and that kids should not be bombarded by biased, commercially motivated messages in a place where they expect the information disseminated to be objective and confined to pedagogical purposes. The debate has become shrill and polarized. "I was speaking to one of my critics not long ago," says Tooned-In's director of school relations, Frank Kohler. "She doesn't own a car because she's opposed to the use of fo ssil fuels. She doesn't go to the movies because she resents the commercials. I said to her, 'Lady, you don't represent America! "' Yet there is a big problem with both commercialism's critics and its defenders. Neither side adequately distinguishes -- among the many kinds of deals out there -- between those that are genuinely troubling and those that are not; both paint with a broad brush. In the eyes of Ernest Fleishman, senior vice president for education at Scholastic, Inc., a New York-based company that sells books and posters through the schools, many of his antagonists "tend to use shotguns" in their attacks. "They draw no distinctions," Fleishman complains, between the "very, very different kinds of deals schools strike with companies. " But what kind of discriminations should commercialism's critics be making? As Fleishman himself notes, "very few school districts have guidelines covering these matters. …