Scholastic partners with Sunny D to enlist teachers' help in peddling their drink.

Children today spend as much time consuming media as they do sleeping, so it's probably not surprising that children find it easier to identify the image of Ronald McDonald than Jesus.

Research has shown that children can identify child-oriented brands by the age of three, but that doesn't mean they're equipped with the ability to analyze advertisements.

Corporate advertisers are finding new and intrusive methods to influence children to buy their products, which, like McDonald's food, is often damaging to their health and mental well-being. Our cash-strapped public schools have become an increasingly tempting target for advertisers, especially the peddlers of unhealthy sugary foods.

Most recently, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood disclosed a disturbing partnership between Scholastic Inc., a global book publisher known for education materials, and SunnyD, the purveyor of the sugary orange-like drink that's loaded with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The SunnyD Book Spree encourages teachers and parents to have their students collect SunnyD labels in order to exchange them for up to 20 free books. In the Scholastic web site's tips for parents, it encourages them to organize SunnyD parties to spur label collections, start SunnyD Book Spree groups on Facebook and post SunnyD fliers at grocery stores and local libraries.

Indeed, there are enough suspicious connections to keep conspiracy theorists awake through the night. For example, Standard & Poors, the financial rating service, has lately been offering to evaluate and publish the performance, based largely on test scores, of every school district in a given state – a bit of number crunching that Michigan and Pennsylvania purchased for at least $10 million each, and other states may soon follow. The explicit findings of these reports concern whether this district is doing better than that one. But the tacit message – the hidden curriculum, if you will – is that test scores are a useful and appropriate marker for school quality. Who has an incentive to convince people of that conclusion? Well, it turns out that Standard & Poors is owned by McGraw-Hill, one of the largest manufacturers of standardized tests.

With such pressure to look good by boosting their test results, low-scoring districts may feel compelled to purchase heavily scripted curriculum programs designed to raise scores, programs such as Open Court or Reading Mastery (and others in the Direct Instruction series). Where do those programs come from? By an astonishing coincidence, both are owned by McGraw-Hill. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have some influential policy makers on your side when it’s time to make choices about curriculum and assessment. In April 2000, Charlotte K. Frank joined the state of New York’s top education policy-making panel, the Board of Regents. If you need to reach Ms. Frank, try her office at McGraw-Hill, where she is a vice president. And we needn’t even explore the chummy relationship between Harold McGraw III (the company’s chairman) and George W. Bush. (1) Nor will we investigate the strong statement of support for test-based accountability in a Business Week cover story about education published in March 2001. Care to guess what company owns Business Week?

Yes, some corporations sell educational products, including tests, texts, and other curriculum materials. But many more corporations, peddling all sorts of products, have come to see schools as places to reach an enormous captive market. Advertisements are posted in cafeterias, athletic fields, even on buses. Soft drink companies pay off schools so that their brand, and only their brand, of liquid candy will be sold to kids.(4) Schools are offered free televisions in exchange for compelling students to watch a brief current-events program larded with commercials, a project known as Channel One. (The advertisers seem to be getting their money’s worth: researchers have found that Channel One viewers, as contrasted with a comparison group of students, not only thought more highly of products advertised on the program but were more likely to agree with statements such as “money is everything,” “a nice car is more important than school,” “designer labels make a difference,” and “I want what I see advertised.”)(5)

Even more disturbing than having public schools sanction and expose children to advertisements(6) is the fact that corporate propaganda is sometimes passed off as part of the curriculum. Math problems plug a particular brand of sneakers or candy; chemical companies distribute slick curriculum packages to ensure that environmental science will be taught with their slant.(7) A few years ago, someone sent me a large, colorful brochure aimed at educators that touts several free lessons helpfully supplied by Procter & Gamble. One kit helps fifth graders learn about personal hygiene by way of Old Spice after-shave and Secret deodorant, while another promises a seventh-grade lesson on the “ten steps to self-esteem,” complete with teacher’s guide, video, and samples of Clearasil.

Indeed, we might even go so far as to identify as one of the most crucial tasks in a democratic society the act of limiting the power that corporations have in determining what happens in, and to, our schools. Not long ago, as historian Joel Spring pointed out, you would have been branded a radical (or worse) for suggesting that our educational system is geared to meeting the needs of business. Today, corporations not only acknowledge that fact but freely complain when they think schools aren’t adequately meeting their needs. They are not shy about trying to make over the schools in their own image. It’s up to the rest of us, therefore, to firmly tell them to mind their own businesses.