The Educational Cost of Schoolhouse Commercialism--The Fourteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends: 2010-2011
Author: Molnar, Alex
Date: 2011-11-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Commercialization,School Business Relationship,Partnerships in Education,Public Education,Marketing,Critical Thinking,Educationally Disadvantaged,Metacognition,Transfer of Training,Educational Environment,Advertising,Elementary Secondary Education

Over the past several decades, schools have faced increasing pressure to &quot;partner&quot; with businesses, both to be seen as responsive to the business community and out of the hope that partnerships would help make up budget shortfalls as states reduced public funding for education. Often, school-business partnerships are little more than marketing arrangements with little if any educational benefit and the potential to harm to children in a variety of ways. The 2010-2011 Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends considers how commercializing activities in schools harm children educationally. It is relatively easy to understand how corporate commercializing activities harm children educationally by undermining curricular messages (as when candy and soft drink ads contradict nutrition lessons) or by displacing educational activities (as when students spend time focused on a corporate contest rather than the curriculum). A less obvious, though perhaps more serious, educational harm associated with school commercialism is the threat it poses to critical thinking. Researchers generally agree that thinking critically requires abilities, such as problem-solving, decision-making, inductive and deductive inference-making, divergent thinking, evaluative thinking, and reasoning. According to the research literature, critical thinking is best cultivated in a school environment that encourages students to ask questions, to think about their thought processes, and thus to develop habits of mind that enable them to transfer the critical thinking skills they learn in class to other, unrelated, situations. It is not in the interest of corporate sponsors to promote critical thinking. Far from it: their interest is in selling their products or services or &quot;telling their story.&quot; Encouraging children to learn to identify and critically evaluate a sponsor's point of view and biases, to consider alternative points of view or products and services, or to generate and consider solutions to problems other than the ones sponsors offer would, from a corporate point of view, be self-defeating. For this reason, sponsored messages will necessarily avoid touching on anything that might lead to thinking inconsistent with the intended message. Although commercializing activities channel student thinking into a corporate-friendly track, the impact on critical thinking of doing so is rarely considered. In part this is because some commercializing activities, such as sponsored educational materials, may, on the surface, appear to have educational benefit. They may, for example, claim to address national standards for basic skills, or to encourage analytic thinking about contemporary issues such as energy policy. Moreover, since marketing is often framed as a &quot;partnership&quot; with schools, even when teachers might want to engage students in thinking critically about the message being marketed, doing so would mean &quot;biting the hand that feeds&quot; the school. Thus, to understand the educational harms of school marketing, it is necessary to understand both how commercial activities cause some things to happen in schools and classrooms and how they prevent or discourage other things from happening. Appended to the report are (1) A list of websites associated with advertising, marketing, health care, nutrition, government policy, education, and academic research, regularly reviewed for material relevant to this report; and (2) Gubbins' Matrix of Thinking Skills. A list of Notes and References is also included. [For &quot;Effectively Embedded: Schools and the Machinery of Modern Marketing--The Thirteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends: 2009-2010,&quot; see ED513814.]