Legislative brief offers an array of model bills to reduce the harm to children from corporate marketing activities in public schools

Contact: Alex Molnar - (480) 797-7261; alex.molnar@asu.edu
Kevin Welner - (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@gmail.com

BOULDER, Colo., and TEMPE, Ariz. (January 13, 2010) -- The widespread growth of school commercialism has been accepted as an inevitable and even necessary trend to help stretch school resources and better connect public schools with employers who will hire their graduates. Yet, as scholars who have closely examined its consequences have repeatedly pointed out, school commercialism undermines education and harms children.

In light of school commercialism's hazards, a team of legal and education scholars is proposing an innovative framework for regulating the practice so as to protect children and strengthen education. The proposals are contained in a Legislation Policy Brief issued today by the Commercialism in Education Research Unit and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University, and the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The brief provides a brief history and overview of schoolhouse commercialism, outlining the forms it takes and documenting the various ways in which it undermines education and harms children.

"Schools that permit corporate marketing offer an education laced with corporate bias," the authors observe, and thus encourage students "to adopt attitudes that serve the interests of corporations."

Further, because many schoolhouse commercialism activities revolve around the marketing of food products and beverages -- much of them of little or no nutritional value -- they subvert lessons on good nutrition. Finally, not only do these commercial activities take time away from the regular curriculum, but they are "clearly antithetical to the underlying purpose of schooling," which is to teach students "to think critically and act intelligently."

The brief points out three broad approaches that can be taken to regulate schoolhouse commercialism:

• Mandates that allow or else partially or completely ban certain activities, best used when the activities involved offer little or no value in return for the harm they present to students.
• Balancing tests to ensure that policy makers adequately assess the relative harms and benefits, if any, of a commercial activity before it is allowed to go forward.
• Process-based reforms to ensure that the interests of all stakeholders -- students and parents as well as educators and school board members, for instance -- are accounted for in the decision-making process when commercializing activities are undertaken in schools. For example, the brief suggests that such a reform might include "requiring informed consent of parents," allowing them the final decision on whether or not their children take part in in-school commercial activities.

The brief outlines the appropriate contexts for each of these policy tools and provides model legislative language that can be adopted by states and municipalities to meet their particular needs in regulating school-based commercialism activities, thereby protecting children's right to quality education.

Find the report "Policy and Statutory Responses to Advertising and Marketing in Schools" on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/policy-and-statutory

CONTACT:
Alex Molnar, Professor and Director
Commercialism in Education Research Unit
Education Policy Research Unit
Arizona State University
(480) 797-7261
alex.molnar@asu.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses. This policy brief was made possible in part by the generous support of Consumers Union.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org)

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