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White Spot, a popular BC restaurant chain, solicits hamburger concepts from third and fourth grade students and one of the student's ideas becomes a feature on the kids' menu. Home Depot donates playground equipment to an elementary school, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony culminates in a community swathed in corporate swag, temporary tattoos, and a new \"Home Depot song\" written by a teacher and sung by the children. Kindergarten students return home with a school district-prescribed dental hygiene flyer featuring a maze leading to a tube of Crest toothpaste. Schools receive five cents for each flyer handed to a student. While commercialism has existed in our schools for over a century, the corporate invasion of our schools reached unprecedented heights in the 1990s and 2000s after two decades of federal funding cuts and an increasing tendency to apply business models to the education system. Constant cutbacks have left school trustees, administrators, teachers, and parents with difficult decisions about how to finance programs and support students. Meanwhile, studies on the impact of advertising and consumer culture on children make clear that the effects are harmful both to the individual child and the broader culture. Captive Audience explores this compelling history of branding the classroom in Canada.

Commercialism in schools is controversial, and its attracts fierce criticism. However, there is a big problem with both commercialism's critics and its defenders. Neither side adequately distinguishes between the commercial deals that are genuinely troubling and those that are not. Contrary arrangements made by Pizza Hut and Domino's with American schools are explored.

A widely used math textbook \"is coming under national scrutiny for its sprinkling of popular brand names throughout the text\" (MIAMI HERALD). Learn more about the book and what parents, kids and school officials have to say about this issue.

Channel One is delivered to televisions in 12,000 schools, but a coalition seeks to eliminate these commercial broadcasts from classrooms. Learn more about the issue of television advertising in the classroom. The advantages and disadvantages of the Channel One program are discussed.

\"The rise of commercialism is an artifact of the growth of corporate power. It began as part of a political and ideological response by corporations to wage pressures, rising social expenditures, and the successes of the environmental and consumer movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Corporations fostered the anti-tax movement and support for corporate welfare, which helped create funding crises in state and local governments and schools, and made them more willing to carry commercial advertising. They promoted 'free market' ideology, privatization and consumerism, while denigrating the public sphere. In the late 1970s, Mobil Oil began its decades-long advertising on the New York Times op-ed page, one example of a larger corporate effort to reverse a precipitous decline in public approval of corporations. They also became adept at manipulating the campaign finance system, and weaknesses in the federal bribery statute, to procure influence in governments at all levels.\" (Multinational Monitor) The authors comment on the spread of commercialized culture in the US and notes that as commercialism grows more intrusive, public distaste for it will likely increase, as will political support for restricting it, and this hopeful trend will gather strength, in the long run.

\"Commercial activities now [2000] shape the structure of the school day, influence the content of the school curriculum, and determine whether children have access to a variety of technologies. Moreover, it appears from a number of citations that there is an emerging trend for marketers to attempt to bundle together advertising and marketing programs in schools across a variety of media and thus gain a dominant position in the schoolhouse market.\" (SOCIAL EDUCATION) This article examines the commercialization of America's schools.

\"Building on last year's energetic debate in states over how best to protect student data, legislators have intensified efforts in 2015 to address the issue in statehouses. And this year, there's particularly prominent tension between privacy advocates concerned about loopholes through which data can be shared and used inappropriately, and the education technology providers who don't want restrictions on access to learning software and other services.\" (Education Week) This article discusses privacy laws aimed at regulating how education technology companies use student data.

The prevalence of social media makes it a potential alternative to traditional offline methods of recruiting and engaging participants in health research. Despite burgeoning use and interest, few studies have rigorously evaluated its effectiveness and feasibility in terms of recruitment rates and costs, sample representativeness, and retention. This study aimed to determine the feasibility of using Facebook to recruit employed Australian parents to an online survey about managing work and family demands, specifically to examine (1) recruitment rates and costs; (2) sample representativeness, compared with a population-based cohort of parents; and (3) retention, including demographic and health characteristics of parents who returned to complete a follow-up survey 6 weeks later. Recruitment was conducted using 20 paid Facebook advertising campaigns, supplemented with free advertising approaches such as posts on relevant Facebook pages and requests for professional networks to circulate the survey link via Facebook. Recruitment rates and costs were evaluated using the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys, including view rate, participation rate, completion rate, cost per consent, and cost per completer. Sample representativeness was evaluated by comparing demographic and outcome variables with a comparable sample from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children including educational attainment, marital status, country of birth, neighborhood disadvantage, work-family conflict, and psychological distress. Retention was evaluated by comparing the number and demographic characteristics of participants at recruitment and at 6-week follow-up. Recruitment strategies together resulted in 6653 clicks on the survey link, from which 5378 parents consented to participate and 4665 (86.74%) completed the survey. Of those who completed the survey, 85.94% (4009/4665) agreed to be recontacted, with 57.79% (2317/4009) completing the follow-up survey (ie, 43.08% [2317/5378] of parents who consented to the initial survey). Paid Facebook advertising recruited nearly 75% of the sample at Aus $2.32 per completed survey (Aus $7969 spent, 3440 surveys completed). Compared with a population-based sample, participants at baseline were more likely to be university educated (P<.001), experience greater work-family conflict (P<.001) and psychological distress (P<.001), and were less likely to be born outside Australia (P<.001) or live in a disadvantaged neighborhood (P<.001). Facebook provided a feasible, rapid method to recruit a large national sample of parents for health research. However, some sample biases were observed and should be considered when recruiting participants via Facebook. Retention of participants at 6- to 8-week follow-up was less than half the initial sample; this may reflect limited ongoing participant engagement for those recruited through social media, compared with face-to-face.

This article explores how social media use in formal and informal learning spaces can support the development of digital citizenship for secondary school students. As students increasingly spend large amounts of time online (e.g., an average of six hours of screen time per day, excluding school and homework), it is critical that they are developing skills enabling them to find, evaluate, and share information responsibly, engage in constructive conversation with others from diverse backgrounds, and to ensure their online participation is safe, ethical, and legal. And, yet, in spite of the importance of students learning these skills, opportunities for digital citizenship in formal and informal learning spaces have lagged behind our ideals. The article provides a conceptual analysis of civic engagement as digital citizenship and considers how digital media applications can support citizenship education in middle- and high-school grades. Then, empirical research is provided that demonstrates how high school students develop digital citizenship practices through out-of-school practices. Finally, this article suggests that both dimensions of digital citizenship (i.e., in-school, traditional citizenship education and out-of-school activities aimed at civic engagement) can be integrated through a social media-facilitated curriculum. Finally, recommendations for teaching and learning through social media are offered to educators, community members, practitioners, parents, and others.

In this commentary, the author considers the rise of algorithmic personalization and the power of propaganda as they shift the dynamic landscape of 21st-century literacy research and practice. Algorithmic personalization uses data from the behaviors, beliefs, interests, and emotions of the target audience to provide filtered digital content, targeted advertising, and differential product pricing to online users. As persuasive genres, advertising and propaganda may demand different types of reading practices than texts whose purpose is primarily informational or argumentative. Understanding the propaganda function of algorithmic personalization may lead to a deeper consideration of texts that activate emotion and tap into audience values for aesthetic, commercial, and political purposes. Increased attention to algorithmic personalization, propaganda, and persuasion in the context of K–12 literacy education may also help people cope with sponsored content, bots, and other forms of propaganda and persuasion that now circulate online.