The School Marketplace

It's a crisp fall morning in our nation's heartland. The smell of autumn fills the air with a distinctive scent that can mean only one thing—the end of summer vacation and the first day of school. Teachers eagerly anticipate the new crop of students, the clean classrooms, and the blackboards on which they can lay a new foundation of learning. But as they walk to their rooms, they encounter a number of less traditional features that come with teaching and learning in modern times. There are the banks of gleaming soda and snack machines all ready for students to pick up a soft drink and a candy bar when hunger strikes. And there are advertisements throughout the school, from the covers on students' books to the walls of the gymnasium and the scoreboard on the athletic field. The ads even appear in the classrooms to which the teachers are headed—on the television screens that will show the prepared "news" programs (with ads for junk food and video games) that begin the school day.

All this might sound implausible to people who still have a Norman-Rockwell idea of what schools are like, but anyone who spends time in a public school in 2001 knows it is picture perfect. And while there aren't yet shopping plazas on high school campuses, just think of the Senior High Mall as a logical extension of what already exists.

It's not your mother's bake sale anymore

The phenomenon of commercialization in the schools is not a new one. As far back as the late nineteenth century, when a paint company produced a handout on primary and secondary colors for art teachers to distribute in schools, folks have been sponsoring bake sales and selling advertisements in yearbooks to finance school teams or various small projects. We have allowed businesses access to a school audience, confident that selling a few advertisements or batches of brownies would not compromise a school's basic mission or its financial structure.

In the last decade or so, as teachers are well aware, the quantity, quality, and sophistication of these activities has grown enormously. The growth can be attributed to a number of factors. Kids have more money to spend, and companies have not been slow to realize that they have a new and important group of customers. As for the schools, they face a growing gap between the cost of educating students and the money available to do so. State budget shortfalls and the frequent unwillingness of communities to increase school funding make things difficult in many school districts. And inequities in school funding create additional problems for schools in poorer communities.

A recent report by the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found a fourfold increase in schoolhouse commercialism over the past decade, in areas ranging from corporate sponsorship of lesson plans to agreements between vending companies and schools that provide exclusive rights to these companies in exchange for often hefty compensation.¹ That growth is part of an even broader expansion of investment in private educational enterprises. Many financial firms now have analysts specially trained in education marketing as part of their efforts to recruit new capital. And a host of consultants offer companies help in figuring out exactly how to reach the student "audience" and turn them into faithful consumers.

But as teachers know, you don't have to go beyond the nearest school to see evidence of the lucrative nature of the education market. Consider, for example, the Burger King-sponsored "spirit buses" at District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colo., which are emblazoned with the high school mascot and a smaller Burger King logo.² Or the exclusive contracts for Coke and the candy machine contracts that High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., has with the Mid-Atlantic Coca-Cola Bottling Company and the Monumental Vending Company.³ Or Channel One, the controversial company that provides "news programming" directly to classrooms, (with commercials geared to the captive youth audience).

Supporters of these kinds of commercial deals point out that this supplemental educational funding is sought after by, and can be a boon to, schools. In the case of High Point High School, for instance, the school received nearly $100,000 in the 1999-2000 academic year, the first year of the program, and this helped pay for teacher training, computer rewiring, and Black History Month activities.

Although the in-school marketplace seems firmly established, in fact, there is a running debate between those who have no problem with companies advertising and selling their products to kids in school and those who strongly oppose the practice as inappropriate, even dangerous, and certainly not worth the money schools get in return. At the core of the conflict is a clash between the desire of companies to expand their sales in a lucrative market—and build brand loyalty as early as possible—and the belief that children, at least when they are in school, should be free from efforts to influence (some would say brainwash) them into buying particular products—or any products at all.

Perhaps the best comparison comes from another controversial area—the question of religion in the public schools. The so-called wall of separation between church and state is still standing in the public schools, despite years of attack, because children's minds are deemed to be particularly vulnerable. In a series of cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has found a variety of activities unconstitutional, including officially sanctioned school prayer, a prohibition on teaching evolution, and a display of the Ten Commandments in the classroom.⁴ The underlying rationale in these decisions is the coercive effect on students implicit in these statutory schemes and the fact that students are essentially a captive audience.

This analysis suggests a basis for regulating commercial activity in schools—and defining what should be kept out and what should be allowed. The wall separating learning from buying and selling in our schools has already been breached, and no one expects to reconstruct it. But the crux of the issue is where to set the limits. If both businesses and schools are eager for the profits a fiscal relationship brings, we need to strike a balance—one that allows corporations interested in supporting teaching and learning to do so while keeping in mind that education, not coercion, should be the number one priority and goal. This is a tricky balance to strike, and it is fraught with problems. One question we need to ask is whether some forms of commercialization are inherently more dangerous to schools than others.

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Commercial activity in the schools takes a number of different forms, notably direct advertising, product sales and incentive programs, and indirect or sponsored advertising. Each has its own advantages for the seller and for the school, some obvious, others less clear; and each poses its own problems for the school, a proposition confirmed by a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report that examined the growth and regulation of commercial activity in the schools.⁵

The most obvious type of school-related commercial activity is direct advertising. It can be found, in some form or another, throughout most secondary school campuses, but perhaps the best known, and certainly the most controversial, form of direct advertising in the schools is Channel One. Introduced in 1989 by media magnate Christopher Whittle, who went on to found the Edison Schools, the program claims to reach more than 8 million teenagers.⁶

As teachers in classrooms across the country are well aware, Channel One is a twelve-minute satellite-fed program consisting of ten minutes of news and two minutes of commercials. Participating schools sign a contract with Channel One agreeing that they will show the programming 90 percent of all school days in 80 percent of all classrooms. In exchange, Channel One installs a free satellite dish and internal wiring and provides two videocassette recordings and a nineteen-inch TV set for each classroom, all of which Channel One owns, operates, and maintains.⁷

The basic criticism of Channel One is that students in a classroom are a captive audience and should not be watching advertisements during time meant for learning. Supporting this criticism are questions about the news programming as well as the fact that teachers have no control over the content of the program or the commercials.

Channel One news has been disparaged, with some justification, as being more style than substance. Its news stories are generally slickly produced short features, accompanied by music, polls, quizzes, and high-tech graphics; and they bear, in style at least, more than a passing resemblance to the programming on MTV. While some of the subjects can be high-minded—Bosnia, the death penalty, or civil rights, for instance—the treatment is fast paced and lightweight. A 1998 study bore out these criticisms and concluded that the news stories were limited in their educational content. It showed, for example, that they gave little coverage to economic issues, something the sociology professor who conducted the study found surprising, given the numbers of schools where Channel One is shown that are in high-poverty areas. And Channel One's news segments drew disproportionately on whites and males for on-camera interviews.⁸

The ads, in both style and substance, are representative of the range of products and fashions you'd expect to see marketed to young people, including video games, armed-forces recruitment, razors, and colleges. Above and beyond the problem of advertising to kids in school, critics across the political spectrum have objected to the content in a number of ads, in particular, those focused on violent or sexually oriented movies and junk food.

Even critics who don't find Channel One morally objectionable may wonder if it is educational. For example, how much critical thinking does it generate? According to a recent report in The American Prospect, students in schools using Channel One show little measurable increase in their tendency to discuss news outside the school or seek additional information from outside news sources—and little or no gain in achievement.⁹ And while teachers could base a lesson or even a unit on how to "read" advertising or evaluate news reporting, it's not practical to mount a daily critique of Channel One. The GAO study indicates that a number of the schools simply extend homeroom time and air the broadcasts then. Other schools report that some teachers let students talk quietly during the program (the contracts apparently only require that the televisions be on, not necessarily watched).¹⁰ But it's still time taken away from teaching in the already squeezed and overstructured classroom day.

A 1998 study by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, looking at this loss of teaching time in fiscal terms, concluded that the Channel One programming costs taxpayers $1.8 billion a year in time taken out of the school day, and the two minutes of commercials alone cost $300 million.¹¹ (It's useful, incidentally, to put these figures beside Channel One's earnings—at $200,000 for a thirty-second commercial, Channel One apparently made $346 million in 1999.¹² If this calculation is correct, taxpayers spent $1.8 billion so a company could make $346 million.)

Channel One defends its product saying that it's evaluated every day by millions of students, teachers, and administrators who wouldn't use it if they didn't like it. Perhaps, but only if you redefine "product." In this case, it is not the programming but the equipment used to watch it, which schools use for far more than showing Channel One. For poor school districts, many of which would otherwise be unable to afford this equipment, Channel One's TV sets, wiring, and satellite dish can be a significant benefit. But some critics doing the cost-benefit analysis ask whether the value schools derive is worth the cost. Would it be a wiser investment of taxpayer money to buy the equipment and give kids back the real time with teachers?

While Channel One has an apparent lock on in-class TV advertising, a newer and rapidly growing company, ZapMe! has taken a similar approach using the Internet. That company contracts to install up to fifteen multimedia personal computers and monitors, a high-speed Internet connection, and a printer in the computer lab of a middle or high school. The browser gives students access to twelve thousand selected educational sites. In exchange for the equipment, the schools must use the computers an average of four hours a day.¹³ The downside? The screens the kids look at contain advertisements sold by the company and beamed at students.

Because of the growth in Internet use and schools' desire for high-speed hookups, a number of companies are venturing into this area. For example, N2H2 of Seattle, the leading maker of filters that block objectionable sites for schools, will waive its $4,000 fee for the software, provided the school puts advertisements for its product on the school home page.¹⁴

The drawbacks from these Internet services are similar to those connected with the advertising portions of Channel One. The GAO report, however, notes an additional threat. The computer services are able to track and report students' Internet use by age, gender, and school ZIP code. This market research does not qualify as advertising per se, but it lays the groundwork for future advertising assaults on young people, both in and out of school.

The greatest danger from this type of research is the invasion of privacy, joined with its covert nature: Most parents, students, and even educators are unaware of the extent or kinds of activities that companies are conducting. Companies say that they aren't using actual names of students because they are not collecting individual data, but that is disingenuous. A consistent identifying term is all that is necessary in order to track a student's preferences and then to market to him or her—or sell that information to someone who has a product to sell. The fact that the student is young is even better.

There's money in it!

The second significant type of school-related commercial activity comes in the form of product sales and incentive programs. These can include cash or credit rebate programs as well as traditional fundraising activities like gift-wrap sales; but the most common and lucrative form of fundraising for schools is product sales, with exclusive soft drink contracts in secondary schools leading the way. According to the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, about 240 schools in thirty-one states now have exclusive arrangements.¹⁵

This type of agreement involves a company such as Coke or Pepsi (or a local bottler) contracting with a school for exclusive rights to put vending machines in the school's hallways and cafeterias in exchange for a portion of the profits. The share a school receives can vary according to the exclusivity of the deal and the amount of soda sold. In addition, the agreements usually require schools to place banners, billboards, or signs advertising the product throughout the school.

While the agreements are similar in structure, the extent and type of commitment on both sides can differ from school to school. Cibola High School in Albuquerque, N.M., for example, has an informal agreement with the supplying company through which the school makes about $3 per student and gets a baseball scoreboard and ten $1,000 competitive grants for teachers. In contrast, Ottawa Hills High School in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a 10-year exclusive contract that guarantees a minimum commission of $20 per student, promotional merchandise and student incentive programs valued at more than $600,000, and guaranteed earnings for the district of between $785,000 and $1.5 million.¹⁶

Many school districts are eager to make these arrangements—indeed they are frequently the initiators and use their power as desirable customers to get a favorable deal. School officials in Sarasota, Fla., for instance, facing a $15 million budget shortfall, recently asked Coke and Pepsi to bid for the right to become sole provider.¹⁷ (Coke was the winner.) The issue that sometimes gets overlooked—or buried—is whether the reward is enough to compensate for the health risks to students and burden on schools. The Washington Post recently quoted one principal's advice: "Read the fine print of those contracts, and the costs start to sink in."¹⁸ At High Point High School in Prince George's County, Md., a contract with the Coca-Cola Company requires that the school guarantee sales of 4,500 cases of soda a year. A condition of another of the school's vending machine contracts is that the school's student population not drop below 2,100 students.¹⁹

Needless to say, some schools feel more than a little pressure to meet their goals, even to the point of ignoring or bending state and local statutes that regulate when vending machines must be turned off. In Colorado Springs, for example, where the contract required district students to consume seventy thousand cases of soft drink per year, a district official sent schools a letter suggesting that a regulation limiting vending machine use be interpreted loosely and the machines be turned off for only a half-hour before and after breakfast.²⁰ The High Point contract specifically states that if the board of education enforces its policy of turning off vending machines during the school day, the guaranteed commission on sales will be suspended.²¹

And what about the health tradeoffs? Is the money that schools make on vending machines worth the possible dangers that the products sold from those machines pose to students' health? A number of reports in recent years have pointed to an increase in obesity among young Americans and the significant impact that soft drinks and candy can have on that condition.²² A congressional report issued in 2001 makes a more general point, noting that the availability of foods sold in competition with school meals can lead to unhealthy eating habits and subsequent health risks for young people.²³

To be fair, most young people, given the choice, will go for junk food. One principal, whose school has a contract with Coke, had this confirmed when he tried offering a nutritious alternative by filling one machine with health drinks, including V-8 juice. He stopped after nobody purchased them.²⁴ But the difficulty of influencing adolescent eating habits does not seem a good reason for capitalizing on kids' bad habits, even to make money for schools. And some parents and administrators go on trying to get healthier snacks and drinks included in vending machines. The principal of Laurel High School in Maryland recently banned candy bars and licorice in favor of granola bars, chips, and pretzels. She also stopped Pepsi from selling its high-calorie, high-caffeine drink Mountain Dew.²⁵

While soda machines are popular and lucrative, they are by no means the only way schools are "selling out." In Texas, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district, like many other school districts across the country, sells signs in its gym and athletic fields and on the district's school buses. One sales package at the same school, reported by Education Week, includes recognition on the district's voicemail system and the rights to a sign on the roof of a school building that is visible to passengers flying into the adjacent Dallas-Fort Worth airport.²⁶ Another popular way of making money is to sell naming rights—the way commercial sports arenas and ballparks do—which allow sponsors to name classrooms and laboratories, wings on school buildings, and even buildings themselves. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) school district, which has such a policy, scoffs at the idea of a Coca-Cola High or Reebok Middle School, but what a temptation that would be for some cash-strapped district.²⁷

Look for the hidden message

A third form of school-based advertising is known as indirect advertising, and it is carried out through grants or sponsored educational materials such as videos, lesson plans, and other classroom activities, as well as corporate-sponsored teacher training or corporate-sponsored contests. The primary aim of indirect advertising is not to sell a product but to show that companies are "friends," interested in helping schools with popular and worthwhile causes.

And the help they provide can be considerable. Think about the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now the Intel Science Talent Search), which for years identified talented science students and helped them finance their college educations at the same time as it gave academic achievement the kind of boost ordinarily accorded only to winning sports teams. The Coca-Cola Company has a number of education-based initiatives, including a partnership with Reading is Fundamental and a scholars program that provides college scholarships to promising high school seniors.²⁸ Pizza Hut's Book-It program, another of the many corporate initiatives in support of a laudable goal, encourages children to read books during the summer, with the aim of helping them become lifelong readers.

But a company that backs a good cause also hopes that some of the warm feeling generated will come into play when people step up to make a purchase. Since kids don't buy refrigerators, Westinghouse's implied pitch was directed to adults, but it's a different story with much of the indirect advertising in the schools. In the Pizza Hut program, for example, a student who reads a certain number of books gets a certificate entitling him to a small pizza, and it's no stretch to point out that this is a good way of getting kids to bring their families into the restaurant. And like many other programs involving giveaways and prizes, it is a technique for encouraging early brand-name recognition and loyalty that the company hopes will become life long.

Lesson plans and other educational materials provided by corporate sponsors free of charge or at a nominal cost raise other issues, particularly that of bias. Chances are, lesson plans or curricula produced by a corporation will reflect the area in which the company does business—an oil company is unlikely to issue materials on nutrition. But if the oil company offers a curriculum on conservation and the environment, the possibility of conflict of interest is obvious. The lesson plans and readings for students could be superficial, they could be excellent; they could be biased or they could be scrupulously fair. But they are part of a public relations strategy, an effort to show the company in the best possible light, so there is no reason to assume they are balanced in their approach—and often they are not.

Corporate materials for teachers are also increasingly available through the Internet. This makes them more accessible but does not answer the basic question about the suitability of particular examples as teaching materials. Unlike the situation with Channel One or one of the Internet companies, teachers generally are free to exclude corporate curricula from their classrooms. If they decide to let the curricula in, teachers may use them in whatever way they choose, with any caveat they think is needed. So that what could be the most threatening example of commercialism in the schools—threatening because it could directly affect the intellectual content of classroom instruction—is still largely under the control of teachers.

Helping schools say no

The public has become increasingly aware of and concerned about business involvement in schools. As a result, there is growing talk of passing laws to regulate school commerce. In fact, certain forms of commercial activities in schools are already covered by federal and state laws. According to the GAO report, nineteen states have regulations concerning specific commercial activities in schools. These include a California law prohibiting school boards from adopting instructional materials that provide "unnecessary exposure to brand names, products, or company logos"; a Rhode Island statute saying that schools may not engage in any commercial activity unless authorized by the state department of education; and a Virginia law that forbids advertising on the inside or outside of school buses.²⁹

Even federal officials are getting into the act. Two different amendments to the recently passed Senate version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act concerned commercialization, including one requiring parental consent before marketers are allowed to collect any information from kids at school.³⁰ Senator Patrick Leahy has talked about introducing legislation to restrict sales of snacks and soft drinks and limit marketing in schools.³¹ And the U.S. Agriculture Department recently sent Congress a report recommending that all snacks sold in schools meet federal government nutritional standards.³² (Opponents of commercialization shouldn't count on much help from the current U.S. Department of Education. According to the Washington Post, Education Secretary Rod Paige helped obtain a $5 million contract with Coke when he was superintendent of Houston's school system.³³)

Although all this may sound like a concerted effort to regulate commercial activity, it is, in reality, a piecemeal approach. What is more, when legislation is introduced, it often encounters resistance even from those who might agree with it in principle. After the defeat of a recent state legislative effort to limit commercial activities in Maryland public schools, one state senator who voted against it commented, "Though I might agree in concept, I cannot agree we should do it until we fully fund the... schools." Other legislators involved in the debate suggested that the issue should be left to local school officials³⁴ and the principle of local control of the schools, which is still powerful, is probably the main reason why federal or state legislation regulating commercial activity in the schools is unlikely to come to much.

Companies themselves can be responsive to pressure and negative publicity connected with their school ventures. Channel One is making an effort to improve the quality of its news programming (although it was recently criticized for its new "Share It" promotion, which rewards "school employees" with $500 for every successful referral of a new subscriber. Channel One calls the money an "honorarium" that can be used by the school). The Coca-Cola Company recently said that it would pull back from earlier aggressive efforts to market to schools by encouraging its local bottlers not to require schools to sell a contractual amount of Coca-Cola. It has also formed the Education Advisory Council, which includes former education secretaries Richard Riley and Lamar Alexander and other education leaders, to help advise the company on education policy.³⁵

Ironically, Coke's move to disentangle itself from the schools has so far been less than successful. First, it was criticized by opponents of in-school marketing as a business decision designed primarily to let the company stay in schools despite a rising tide of opposition. Then, individual Coke bottlers largely ignored the order from the head office and continued to make exclusive contracts with schools eager to maintain their cash cow. To add to its problems, Coke has had to worry about competitors like Pepsi jumping in and taking the business it has altruistically left behind.

The buck stops—where?

There is nothing inherently wrong with private enterprise assisting public institutions—and this includes public schools. But it is critical to recognize that children and schools are different from museums or hospitals and that different kinds of commercial involvement carry different advantages, risks, and problems.

As corporate America continues to look for new, young customers, schools and ever younger students will find themselves the targets of increasingly seductive appeals. What's more, if we enter a period of recession, corporate money will be even more tempting for schools than it is now.

In a recent commentary on encouraging students to eat nutritious school meals instead of junk food from vending machines, the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that healthy foods are in "competition with foods that are marketed to children through multi-million-dollar glitzy and sophisticated advertising campaigns."³⁶ We could apply this analysis to any number of school-related commercial activities, including some within the classroom itself.

Making sure that commercial interests are not allowed to take precedence over schools' responsibilities to their students will require a combined effort from everyone concerned: teachers and administrators, who must be alert to the danger of opening students to coercion—and provide the first line of defense against this danger; businesses, who need to continue their commitment to public education but with fewer strings and without overwhelming cash-needy schools; policymakers at both the state and federal level, who must do far more to provide all public schools with the kind of funding they need; and, perhaps most important, citizens at the local level—parents and other members of the community—who create a climate of opinion that determines to a large extent what goes on in the schools and whose votes on school-bond and tax issues often make the difference between a school district that has enough money for its needs and one that is pinched. If these groups pull together, we can provide schools with more qual bargaining power, and we can achieve an appropriate balance between kids as students and kids as consumers. But limiting corporate involvement in the schools will also demand a renewed commitment, on the part of all citizens, to our public schools—as public institutions that exist for the common good and that are therefore worthy of sufficient support from public dollars.

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Alexander Wohl is AFT's director of public affairs. He was formerly director of communications and a speechwriter at the U.S. Department of Education. A teacher of constitutional law at American University, he writes regularly for Legal Times, The American Prospect, and Biography magazine.

Endnotes

1. Alex Molnar (1998), "Sponsored Schools and Commercialized Classrooms: Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends in the 1990s," Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

2. Jessica L. Sandham (1997), "From Walls to Roofs, Schools Sell Ad Space," Education Week, June 4, pp. 1, 22.

3. David Nakamura (2001), "Schools Hooked on Junk Food," The Washington Post, Feb. 27, p. A1.

4. See Abington School District vs. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Wallace vs. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985); Epperson vs. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968); Stone vs. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980).

5. United States General Accounting Office (2000), "Public Education: Commerical Activities in Schools," p. 9 (hereafter, "GAO Report").

6. Andrew Trotter (1997), "Channel One Focuses More on Style than Substance, Study Says," Education Week, Jan 29.

7. GAO Report, p. 26.

8. William Hoynes (1997), "News for a Captive Audience: An Analysis of Channel One," Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Extra!, May/June.

9. Russ Baker (2001), "Stealth TV," American Prospect 3:12, Feb 12.

10. GAO Report, p. 27.

11. Max B. Sawicky and Alex Molnar (1998), "The Hidden Costs of Channel One: Estimates for the 50 States," Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

12. Baker, "Stealth TV."

13. GAO Report, p. 27.

14. Daniel Golden (1999), "Media Literacy Sparks a New Debate over Commercialism in Schools," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17.

15. Center for Commercial-Free Public Education (1998), "School Contracts with Coke and Pepsi and Others," Oakland, Calif.

16. GAO Report, p. 32.

17. Betsy McKay (2001), "Coke Finds Its Exclusive Contracts Aren't so Easily Given Up," Wall Street Journal, June 26.

18. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

19. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

20. Kate Zernike (2001), "Coke To Dilute Push in Schools for its Products," The New York Times, March 14.

21. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

22. Marion Nestle and Michael Jacobson, "Halting the Obesity Epidemic: A Public Health Policy Approach," Public Health Reports, v. 115, Jan./Feb. and Grace Wyshak (2000), "Teenaged Girls, Carbonated Beverage Consumption, and Bone Fractures," Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 154:6, June 1.

23. U.S. Department of Agriculture (2001), "Foods Sold in Competition with USDA School Meal Programs," Jan. 12.

24. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

25. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

26. Sandham, "From Walls to Roofs."

27. Carol Chmelynski (2001), "School Districts Solicit Private Donations," School Board News, Aug. 14.

28. The Coca-Cola Foundation (2001) [Memo from David Summers], July 9.

29. GAO Report, p. 13.

30. Jeffrey Brenner (2001), "Bill Takes on Ads at School," Wired.com, May 17.

31. Tamara Henry (2001), "Coca-Cola Rethinks School Contracts," USA Today, March 13.

32. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

33. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."

34. Howard Libit (2001), "Bill To Limit Ads in Schools Rejected," The Baltimore Sun, March 16.

35. McKay, "Coke Finds"; Hannah Gladfelter Rubin (2001), "Channel One Under Fire for Cash Incentives, Education Daily, August 28; and author's conversation with public relations people representing Coca-Cola and Channel One, July 7 and 8, 2001.

36. Nakamura, "Schools Hooked."