Education Research Report: Marketers Are Busy in Schools

Education Research Report: Marketers Are Busy in Schools:

Marketers Are Busy in Schools

Schoolhouse commercialism continues virtually unabated, despite the harm it does, and neither federal nor state lawmakers are moving to further control the practice, according to a new report released today.

The pervasiveness of commercialism in education has become so broad, its threat so great, and its reported benefits so minor that the report’s authors call on policymakers to ban any such activity unless an independent, disinterested body can certify that it does not harm children’s education.

The recommendation is contained in Schoolhouse Commercialism Leaves Policymakers Behind – The Sixteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism: 2012-2013. The report is published today by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

This year’s report, by Professor Alex Molnar along with Faith Boninger, Joseph Fogarty, and Ken M. Libby, is the latest produced by Professor Molnar, who has been studying schoolhouse commercialism for more than two decades. Molnar, Boninger and Libby are all affiliated with the CU Boulder. Fogarty is principal of Corballa National School in County Sligo, Ireland

At the root of the threat commercialism poses to education is its very nature, the authors write. Commercialism is “a value system that promotes profit above all other concerns and that seeks to transform all relationships into commodities that can be exchanged for money,” they point out. Consequently  it “poses profound threats to the well-being of children and the civic purposes of public education.”

Given the threats of its harm, lawmakers and other policymakers, including school officials themselves, might be expected move forcefully to rein it in, they write – yet they have not done so. The authors suggest a combination of reasons for that: fierce corporate opposition to such legislative or regulatory restrictions, and lack of concern, particularly on the part of the education sector