NEPC Resources on Corporate Involvement in School Reform
The Commercial Transformation of America’s Schools
New Concerns Raised About a Well-Known Digital Learning Platform
NEPC Review: Commercial Cash: How NY Schools Can Raise Extra Money Without Raising Taxes (Urban Institute, September 2019)
Commercial Cash: How NY Schools Can Raise Extra Money Without Raising Taxes gets it half right. This issue brief makes the persuasive legal case that current policy and legal guidance from New York state education officials severely restricts the ability of school districts to allow any form of commercial advertising, making it difficult to raise revenues—without raising taxes—from advertising, sponsorships, and naming rights deals. The brief calls on lawmakers to “free school districts from the current regulatory quagmire by eliminating legal barriers and permitting local decision-making.” But that argument addresses only the revenue half of the equation. The other half, which the brief largely ignores, involves the significant costs of commercial advertising in schools. Those costs include the potential psychological harms stemming from corporate advertising; health-related harms that might flow from promoting foods and drinks with little nutritional value; educational harms coming from the schools’ and educators’ implicit endorsement of commercial culture and even the products themselves; and the emerging harm to privacy presented by digital data collection and targeted digital marketing.
NEPC Review: School District Reform in Newark (National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2017)
In 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, with great fanfare, a $100 million challenge grant for the support of a series of reforms in Newark, NJ schools. The two reports reviewed here are the first attempt at a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the Zuckerberg donation on student achievement. As such, the reports, which were written by a team of economists, have garnered significant attention. The reviewers evaluate the reports and their potential contribution to education policy research.