A Public School Goes Commercial

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:



A Public School Goes Commercial
School notices in Peabody, Mass., will soon feature local advertisements.

By David Bollier


The basic strategy of free-market champions is to discredit government and “starve the beast,” in the infamous phrase of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform — and then to go in for the kill by privatizing the assets that remain. The spoils of our once-great public institutions can then be bought for a song, and private market exploitation can be cast as serving the public good, because desperate institutions will welcome any help that they can get.

The latest appalling version of this drama is being played out in Peabody, Massachusetts, where the town’s school committee unanimously voted to start selling advertisements for the various documents that the public schools send home with students. By putting ads on permission slips, class calendars and other school notices, the school committee hopes to bring in $24,000 at most.

The superintendent of schools, C. Milton Burnett, assured a reporter from the Boston Globe that the ads “will have to be age-appropriate, but we’re thinking about ads from local pizza and ice cream shops, dance and karate schools, maybe from a florist or a college.” Globe reporter David Abel writes:

School officials plan to send letters in coming days to solicit ads from more than 500 members of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. They expect advertisers to pay $300 to run ads on some 10,000 sheets of paper in one elementary school. If a business wants to run ads for all elementary schools in the district, the cost will be $2,000.

The decision to seek a nontraditional source of revenue came as Peabody, like nearly every other district in Massachusetts, has coped with cuts in state aid and escalating costs for everything from contractual obligations to instructional supplies. As a result, Peabody school officials have this year had to lay off six teachers, two guidance counselors, and other staff.

They have also hiked fees for buses and sports. It now costs families with more than one child in the district as much as $600 a year to bus their children to school and $300 for them to play sports.

The scarcity of public dollars is clearly related to the bad economy. But it is also related to the hostility that so many Americans have toward taxes. Everyone seems to think that individual choices in the market will solve our problems — while taxes will only be wasted on “other people.” Here’s the revelation: those “other people” are us. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/public-school-goes-commercial

[LiberalFighter]

1. How many businesses will consider it to be a good decision to advertise this way?

[xchrom]

2. oy. nt

[unhappycamper]

3. And all we need to do to stop this shit is the end the occupations.

How fucking stoopid is this?

[dkf]

4. Funding education is not a federal responsibility.

States need to get their acts together or we need to review the way we do things.