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Welborn
1
Kenley Welborn
Professor Bell
English 1101
3 September, 2012
Corporate Involvement within Public Schools
While the cooperation of corporate entities within the field of education
produces , the reality is that corporate involvement in public schools often is a ploy for
corporations to profit at the expense of impressionable students and educators in need.
Initially, the goal of corporate involvement was to provide goods and services to
education. Many primary and secondary schools and universities enter into these
sponsorships as a means of creating the opportunity for their students to reach out and
achieve their goals. On the contrary, corporations are viewing this as Incentive programs,
Fundraising, Sponsorships, and Partnerships in education.
(I’m not clear on your thesis.
Are you for or against corporate involvement in education?
Make sure to state your side
in your thesis.)
Incentive corporations collaborate primarily through primary and secondary
schools. Pizza Hut is a corporation that is searching for incentives to attract students and
teachers. The popular franchise has an incentive program by the name of “Book It!” Their
goal is to provide an incentive program targeting young students to achieve an
educational goal. Parents and teachers provide goals set for their children and students,
which the students achieve by the number of books they have managed to read over a
period. When the child achieves that goal, Pizza Hut provides a free personal pizza to the
participant. While the program’s intent is to reward young readers, Pizza Hut also
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benefits in return from the participation of students. The corporation gets free
advertisement, along with having their logo placed on materials used by teachers,
students, and sometimes parents.
When the participant in “Book It!” goes to pick up their
prize pizza, they usually sell more pizza to feed the participant’s family. Michael Moore’s
essay, “Idiot Nation”, discusses the overall reading rates and low literacy across the
United States within adults and children. When he wrote his essay in 2001, he claimed
that over forty four million Americans could not read or write above a fourth grade level
(citation?).
He classified them as “functional illiterates”. Within the context of his
argument, “Book It!” is not helping the students become better readers as much as they
are helping them want to be educated for the wrong reasons. As a result, the schools and
students that participate in these incentives with the impression they are benefiting from
the program “Book It!”, but the corporation is truly the one that reaps the profits. The
students are not only getting an unhealthy reward from Pizza Hut, but Pizza Hut benefits
from the advertisement and extra payment of meals from the families of the participants.
(Make sure you cite all this great Pizza Hut information.)
Educational partnerships are another popular trend of corporate involvement in
America. For example, the General Mills corporation has a program called, “Box Tops
for Education”. This program offers free teaching materials for educators teaching
kindergarten through eighth grade. However, in order for educators to receive these
materials, their students must bring in countless amounts of box tops, located on the tops
of General Mills cereal boxes, into school and give them to their teachers. In addition, the
teachers must return the box top labels to General Mills corporation, and in return,
General Mills will reward the educators with money to buy their products. Even though
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the schools are getting money back from their box tops, General Mills benefits most from
this program. In order to profit from the sponsorship, teachers persuade their students to
encourage their parents to buy General Mills brand of cereal. General Mills not only
receives the direct profit for that product, but they will also get their money back when
the teachers use their “reward cash” from buying their products when using the box tops
reward money. The school might think they are benefiting from this partnership, but in
reality, they are not gaining anything from General Mills Corporation.
Fundraising plays a large role in corporative involvement in public schools.
Target, for example, has a program called “Take Charge of Education”. The retail
company offers this benefit to thousands of schools across the United States. Target
donates money to schools, kindergarten through twelfth grade, during the months of
March and September. The funds that Target donates are undesignated, meaning schools
can use them for new technology, classroom supplies and books. Although this program
does provide resources to schools, Target only donates money when their customers
purchase a product from their store or their online store by using their Target Red Card.
The Target Red Card is a credit card issued by Target. By using the program, “Take
Charge of Education”, schools agree that Target donates one-half percent of what they
make off each purchase paid with a Target credit card. Therefore, no one really benefits
from this program except for Target. It is yet enough another of the corporate market
profiting from America’s schools.
Some larger corporations make agreements with schools that allow the
corporation to sell their products within the school and to advertise their products by a
sponsorship. Many schools sign contracts allowing corporations like Coca-Cola and
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Pepsi to place vending machines throughout the school. The school can use only one soft
drink corporation to sell their products, due to competition, and this arrangement allows a
discount payment through contract with the school. Coca-Cola or Pepsi not only advertise
and sell their products through the vending machines, but through sports teams as well.
With sports, for example, if the athletic department signs a sponsorship with Coke, then
they can only sale Coke products in their concession stands and must only advertise for
Coca-Cola and nothing else. If the school breaks the contract, then they will owe Coca-
Cola a large amount of money. Even though Coca-Cola or Pepsi may sell their products
through a vending machine or sports team, the school or sports team only gets a small
percentage of the profit that the corporation has made. Therefore, there is nothing
benefited from the sponsorship.
At first impression, American’s schools benefit and enjoy Incentives from Pizza
Hut, Partner Education from General Mills, Fundraising from Target, and Sponsorships
from large corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
However, with the large number of
budget cuts in education, many schools are depending more heavily on corporate
sponsorships, and the companies involved enjoy the true benefits. The corporations easily
make it look like they are trying to provide goods and services to education to allow the
dreams of students to become true, but in the end that is not the case. They con educators
into their programs, which may provide certain resources, but their goal is to advertise
their products, not to help schools with the materials they need. Consequently, Michael
Moore said it best when he classified America as an ‘Idiot Nation.’ To buy into
misleading corporate greed is idiotic indeed.
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(Very good!
Just make your thesis a bit stronger.
Your argument was clear throughout
the paper, so make sure the thesis clearly reflects your views.
Make sure you cite all your
research and information as well.
I’m assuming you have a works cited page, but don’t
forget your parenthetic documentation as well.
You did a great job for your first college
paper!)