Schoolhouse commercialism report documents pervasiveness, harm of embedded advertising aimed at k-12 students
Contact:
Faith Boninger, (480) 390-6736; fboninger@gmail.com
William Mathis, NEPC, (802) 383-0058; William.Mathis@colorado.edu
BOULDER, CO (Dec. 2, 2010) – Advertising targets children at very young ages, influencing their self-image as well as the pressures they face in society. Girls as young as five years old, for example, report wanting a thinner body. Marketing leads children to internalize commercially-driven ideals in lifestyle and looks, and public schools are now in the forefront, helping bombard their students with commercial messages, according to a new report published today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education and the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University.
The report, Effectively Embedded: Schools and the Machinery of Modern Marketing – The Thirteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends: 2009-2010, explains that the recent recession has made schools more vulnerable than ever to the propositions of marketers. According to report lead author Alex Molnar, a professor at Arizona State University, “this marketing is often promoted as a partnership, and marketing deals appeal to resource-strapped schools as a potential source of funds.” In turn, he says, “they appeal to businesses because school-based marketing and advertising programs are perfectly poised to ‘brand’ children at an early age."
Schoolhouse commercialism works generally through embedding commercial messages in curriculum, entertainment, communication, and the physical environment, as corporations sponsor school contests, programs, lesson plans and fundraising efforts. “Students are generally unable to avoid these activities, and they tend to assume that what their teachers and schools present to them is in their best interest,” explains report co-author, Faith Boninger.
In the face of claims that commercialism in school is harmless to children because it is already so pervasive in their non-school lives, the report’s authors point to recent psychological research showing that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to ads that target their self image and identity formation.
“Research finds that this marketing leads adolescents to internalize messages about looks and lifestyle, creating insecurities in children about their bodies and their identities,” says co-author Boninger.
But there is an alternative. Citing examples in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland, the authors note that people and groups have successfully intervened to protest and block some marketing initiatives. In addition, Molnar and Boninger joined earlier this year with Stanford Law School Professor William Koski to detail a policy framework and model legislative language designed to protect children and the integrity of education programs from advertising and marketing in schools (available at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/policy-and-statutory). Such efforts are likely to continue and intensify, the authors conclude.
Find the report, Effectively Embedded: Schools and the Machinery of Modern Marketing -- The Thirteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends: 2009-2010, by Alex Molnar, Faith Boninger, Gary Wilkinson, Joseph Fogarty, and Sean Geary, on the web at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/Schoolhouse-commercialism-2010.
The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.