Much Ado About Very Little: The Benefits and Costs of School-Based Commercial Activities

Abstract

School-based commercialism exists whenever a district enters into a relationship with a business that provides access to students or staff in exchange for fiscal or in-kind resources (i.e., goods or services). The practice includes business sponsorship of school activities (e.g., sporting events), exclusive agreements (e.g., pouring rights contracts), appropriation of school space (e.g., scoreboards), electronic marketing (e.g., Channel One), fundraising (e.g., candy sales), and the use of sponsored educational materials. Some hold that commercial activities offer districts a much needed means to supplement their resources. Others charge that school-based commercialism needlessly subjects children to unhealthy products and promotions. Given these opposing viewpoints, we find it surprising that little is known about the nature and efficacy of school-based commercialism. Thus far, the literature offers state and local policymakers only anecdotal answers to the following important questions: What is the nature and extent of commercial activities in our schools? What are the monetary and nonmonetary benefits and costs of school-based commercialism? Does school-based commercialism improve or worsen equity? Using multiple methods to analyze data from Pennsylvania and New York school districts, this study shows, for example, that the net benefits of commercial activities are modest at best. The study also shows that districts that engage in commercial activities are poorer, exert greater local effort, and spend less than those that do not. The implications of these and other findings are discussed.

Notes

¹These definitions derive directly from the work of Alex Molnar, Director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU). See http://epsl.asu.edu/ceru/cerustaff.htm for additional information about these specifications.

²See Blokhuis (2008) for a discussion of the evolution of school-based commercial activity regulation in New York, paying specific attention to Channel One.

³We used New York's Combined Wealth Ratio (CWR) and Pennsylvania's Market Value/Personal Income Aid Ratio (MV/PIAR) as measures of district wealth. For our purposes, what makes these ratios suitable proxies is that both balance a given district's full value property wealth and income per pupil against statewide averages. See New York State Education Department (2007) and Pennsylvania Department of Education (2007) for detailed discussions of how these ratios are computed.

⁴We acknowledge that true differences might be masked by our limited sample size, particularly with regard to appropriated space in New York (N = 9).

⁵For Pennsylvania, we used the Market Value/Personal Income (MV/PI) Aid Ratio as a proxy for district wealth. The MV/PI ratio is a “reverse index” in which higher numbers represent lower wealth (Hartman & Nelson, 2001; Pennsylvania Education Department, 2007). For New York, we used the Combined Wealth Ratio (CWR) as a proxy for district wealth. The CWR compares a district's full market property value and personal income to statewide averages, so that poorer districts have lower figures (Brent, 2001; New York State Department of Education, 2007).

⁶For both Pennsylvania and New York local effort represents equalized mills, which is calculated by dividing a school district's total local taxes collected (e.g., property taxes) by its total market value.