AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to turn right now to another place in California. Berkeley, California, which has been the center — at the center of a national debate over the role of advertising in the schools, is weighing a plan to limit corporate access to its children. The school board took its first look on Wednesday at a policy that would make sure that any deals between the schools and corporations would not require children to read, watch or listen to advertising in their lessons or in the classroom. They also would not be forced to wear a company’s logo or insignia on athletic uniforms or equipment. But still, critics are not satisfied.

Berkeley High School is the latest school to be swept headlong into this national debate over the role of advertising in public schools. Soft drink giant Pepsi has offered to spend at least $90,000 at the school for the exclusive right to sell beverages in Berkeley High’s vending machines for seven years. The so-called pouring rights offer also includes a flashy new electronic scoreboard for the football field. The offer has generated heated debate in Berkeley and renewed interest in the role of commercialization and public education nationwide.

We’re joined now by two people who have been active around this issue. Marianne Manilov is executive director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, which is a national group of parents, teachers, students, school board members and administrators in 41 states working against commercialization and for public schools. She’s based in San Francisco and also lives in Berkeley. Sarah Church also joins us. She’s a sophomore at Berkeley High School.

Why don’t we begin with Sarah? And I want to thank you for waking up so early. What is your take on what’s happening right now in your high school? What’s this battle all about?

SARAH CHURCH: Well, I think it’s about money. And that’s a problem, because the role of a school is to provide education. And while some people may think that this deal will help us in educating youth, I think we really need to be careful, because the corporation’s role in this, they’re trying to make profit. They’re trying to make money. If they wanted to help us give our students education, they would just make a donation. And because it’s a business deal, they’re about making profit, and when we make a deal with them, we incorporate their goals and their needs into what we’re doing. And the school really doesn’t need to be trying to make money right now. Trying to give students a good education is quite enough for them to be doing. And I think it’s a mistake to enter into something where we capitalize the school.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sarah, about how many students attend Berkeley High? And what’s been the reaction among the general student body to this issue?

SARAH CHURCH: There are 2,000 to 3,000 students. It fluctuates very much, but there are lots of students at Berkeley High. We haven’t taken any sort of poll, but there seems to be a healthy batch of both — students on both sides of the issue. A lot of students are involved in sports. We have 32 sports teams. And the money would go pretty much exclusively to sports. And a lot of students are concerned that some students are being excluded from sports because they can’t afford to buy the equipment or the uniforms required, and that’s where this money issue comes in.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Marianne Manilov, I’d like to ask you — you’re the director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education. How widespread is this now even in public high schools or high schools around the country? And why is your organization so devoted to trying to prevent the spread of commercialization in the high schools?

MARIANNE MANILOV: Well, the Pepsi deals are sort of just the latest part of commercialization in the classroom. And we’ve already seen, because we’ve been in operation for five years, where these type of deals lead us, because we’re already seeing sponsored curriculum. On Monday in Oakland, there’s a training by Nike, which actually is Nike training teachers to use Nike curriculum. And we’re already seeing — 

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Nike curriculum”?

MARIANNE MANILOV: Well, Nike has just put out a curriculum this fall which is essentially — it’s an environmental education curriculum, and it asks teachers to spend a week with their students actually having them make a sneaker. And the purpose of this project, supposedly, is to show how many ways that you can use a recycled material within the life of a sneaker. And it’s a week, though, of class time. And essentially, what it really is is a big PR for Nike at a time when it’s coming under, you know, a lot of attack for its sweatshop practices. It makes making a sneaker seem like a simple crafts project.

And Exxon has just announced three weeks ago that it’s going to be spending $8 million training teachers in science. And this is not a company that we’ve not seen biased science materials from. Exxon, again, has very biased science materials about the Alaskan oil spill.

AMY GOODMAN: Just one quick comment on the Nike story. A friend was just telling me about this new slogan for Nike, sneakers being made “for children by children”?

MARIANNE MANILOV: OK.

SARAH CHURCH: That’s funny.

AMY GOODMAN: But back to Exxon.

MARIANNE MANILOV: So, the point is that it seems like just a simple scoreboard, and in Berkeley High’s case, they would be taking advertising on the scoreboard. But I already spoke with the coach, the athletic director there, Joe Martin, and behind the Pepsi deal, he has a Reebok deal waiting. So, this is a school that’s looking at significantly getting involved with corporate partnerships. And I think Sarah, as one of the student members of the Student Awareness Committee, has organized a debate. And definitely the school and the community is really thinking about: Do we want Pepsi to be the company that we get behind, which, essentially, they make caffeinated soda water? Is that something that we say, “Yeah, this is a great thing”?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sarah, for Berkeley, which has long been the center of progressive politics in the United States, it seems to me almost beyond belief that anybody associated with the Berkeley school district would even consider this situation. What’s happening with the school board there?

SARAH CHURCH: Well, the school board, as she said, just came out with a policy that would limit any funding that we got from a corporate or a private sponsor. And there is something included that keeps them out of the classroom, keeps them from influencing our curriculum in any way, asking us to teach anything or not to teach anything, such as the labor practices in some other countries, and not influence the school’s curriculum with the interests of the corporate sponsor. However, there is — there are a lot of ambiguities in the policy and a lot of ways to get around it. And I’m sure that
our athletic director, Coach Martin, will try, in his best way, to help the corporations do what they want to do with our school, regardless of the policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you say that?

SARAH CHURCH: Well, he has showed that his interest is to raise money for the students so that they can play sports. And I think that that’s a very good sentiment. I think that it needs to be looked at and tried — we should try to meet that goal, where any student can play the sport of their choice in Berkeley High regardless of their financial position. But I think that this is the wrong way to go. I think that his statement earlier that bake sales and car washes aren’t working anymore isn’t based in fact, because I have a couple friends who were on sports teams last year, and they raised a sufficient amount of money to buy themselves uniforms, with simple things that they did themselves, as car washes, bake sales, garage sales.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting, because it goes beyond even the corporations, but when you have corporations just pouring in money, one of the things that those bake sales and car washes do is they build community, and they’re about people working together and, you know, trying to raise money from the community, so getting community support. And when you turn to corporate control, these kind of rituals that we’ve all grown up with fall by the wayside, and it seems that you don’t need to do anything to keep community together anymore but turn to a corporation.

MARIANNE MANILOV: Well, I don’t even think that these deals are about fundraising. I mean, I spoke with Coach Martin. I think he’s new to the community. That’s how this happened. And the Pepsi deal was about to be passed sort of in the middle of the night. And luckily, because the Berkeley community is so aware, they said, “Hold on, wait a second. What is this?” And the contract was withdrawn from a school board agenda, and now we see the dialogue going on. And now the school board is beginning to say, “Wait, maybe we don’t want to do this.” And I think that’s a good thing that’s happening. And it’s happened in Madison and Seattle. The entire city of Seattle has banned advertising in their schools and has a 200-member community group up there really trying to look at the school’s financing, because they’re looking at a $30 million deficit over five years.

And I think that’s the larger issue, is that this is being proposed as a financial solution for schools, which is a complete joke. There isn’t a school around the country that has met a major financial deficit or even made a significant amount of money in real terms by entering into these deals. The largest contract in the country we saw was in Colorado, and there they’ve earned — it’s $7 million over 10 years, which sounds like a huge amount of money, but it’s a district of 88,000 students. When you do the math on that, it’s about $7 a student per year. And that’s not really going to even make a difference in any significant way in that community. But it’s something that is a sign of desperation, and it’s also a sign that these companies are coming in and taking people out to dinner and saying, “Hey, you just need to sign on the dotted line, and we’ll get you some scoreboards.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Marianne Manilov, executive director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, and Sarah Church, a sophomore at Berkeley High School.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Marianne Manilov, if you could tell us a little bit in terms of — you’ve mentioned some of the cities and school districts that have resisted this effort. And what are some around the country that you see as especially troubling in terms of how they have gone along with, besides, you mentioned, Colorado?

MARIANNE MANILOV: And Colorado is — unfortunately, that’s the worst situation we have in the country, where you have the most commercialized school in Colorado Springs, where they have billboards on the school walls and on the buses. And there, the superintendent, who I speak with fairly regularly, will say, “You know, look, we haven’t raised as much cash as we had controversy.” But he hadn’t had a bond measure passed in 13 years.

Other places where there’s a lot of commercialism include Texas, Florida, but really every school in the country has some form of commercialism now because of all these sponsored materials I was speaking about earlier, where you have Nike sponsoring curriculum or Burger King doing something on nutrition. And essentially what we’re doing is selling off our school day piece by piece. And I wish I could say that there wasn’t a commercialized classroom, and I’m sure there probably are in some private schools, but we have citizens doing commercialism walkthroughs all over the country, and what they find is how much commercialism is already there. At Berkeley High, they’re already looking at all their business partnerships and saying, “What is good here, and what is bad?” And I think that it’s something that comes in very quietly through the back door, and then all of a sudden it’s one little deal, and then it’s two, and then it’s three, or it’s one sponsored curriculum that a teacher picks up, and then it’s two and three and four, and all of a sudden we’re losing class time.

AMY GOODMAN: Marianne Manilov, you mentioned Exxon. You mentioned Nike. We’ve been talking about Pepsi. What about other companies, like Shell and DuPont? I understand they, too, are developing curriculum for the schools.

MARIANNE MANILOV: Well, they both — Shell and DuPont both have curriculum already. Shell has a curriculum which essentially asks students to learn about getting back to nature through driving there in their car or in their Jeep. And DuPont has one that is a three-part series. It’s called “Chemapalooza,” and it’s a sort of dancing, you know, MTV-style video series that tells students that we are all made of chemicals, that there’s no difference between water or chlorine bleach. So, the largest form of commercialism, though, is and remains Channel One, which is an in-school television program with 10 minutes of, quote-unquote, “news” and two minutes of advertising, which is broadcast to 8 million students every morning.

AMY GOODMAN: And that, I understand, in a number of schools. Some of the rules on that is teachers cannot turn down the television volume, either during the whole show, so that students really have to pay attention, or also they cannot turn down the TV during commercials.

MARIANNE MANILOV: Right. And there have been a number of protests, teachers and particularly students. Our organization was founded because students were concerned about it. And that’s what interests me about this issue, is why students like Sarah are standing up and taking a position against corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: Channel One, by the way, owned by Whittle, now apparently bought by ABC. Is that right? Disney?

MARIANNE MANILOV: No, it’s — well, it’s not bought by ABC. Prime Media is actually the name of the company, and they’re a subsidiary of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts. It’s a leverage buyout firm. You might remember the movie Barbarians at the Gate. That was about that company. So, it’s a very large company, and they’re in partnership, though, with ABC. ABC is providing news to Channel One at this time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they’re making money from that.

MARIANNE MANILOV: I’m sure.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sarah — I’d like to ask Sarah, in the little time that we have left — if you could tell us: What about those who argue, “Hey, this is free enterprise. This is what America is all about”? Why should students be worried about corporations and free enterprise coming into the schools? How would you answer that?

SARAH CHURCH: Well, this is about — wait. I’m sorry. What was the question?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That this country is based on free enterprise and capitalism, and why should students be worried about corporations coming into the schools?

SARAH CHURCH: Well, I don’t think that a school is where free enterprise should be played out. I think that a school is about education, and that if anyone is going to be taking care of a school’s financial needs, it should be the government. And if that needs to be through taxation of larger corporations, then that should be the way that it’s done. But I think free enterprise has no place in the school, because a school does not have a capitalist goal. It has a goal of education, and students should be able to get an education and not have to worry about how much money anyone is making off of their curriculum.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you both very much for joining us. And if you have a phone number or website you’d like to give out, you could do it now. Sarah Church, a sophomore at Berkeley High School, and Marianne Manilov, executive director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, a national group of parents, teachers, students, school board members and administrators in states around the country, working against commercialization of the public schools. What is the phone number there at the center?

MARIANNE MANILOV: We have a 1-800 line. It’s 1-800-UNPLUG1.

AMY GOODMAN: 1-800-UNPLUG1. Well, thank you very much to both of you for joining us. That’s 1-UNPLUG1. You are — 

MARIANNE MANILOV: Thank you for having us.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. And, Juan, by the way, since we were just talking to a student, I’m really looking forward to the graduation party. We’re already making plans for you as soon as your college paper that you handed in after 30 years is accepted and graded.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Amy, I should never have told you about that.

AMY GOODMAN: But one other thing: Will you bring that paper in when you get it back, so that we can read it on the air?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, I may actually offer it for the pledge period.

AMY GOODMAN: For listeners who missed it yesterday, Juan was very active, a leader in the Columbia strike in 1968. And, well, he didn’t get his college degree from Columbia in New York then, but he has just handed in his last paper, and he may be getting it any day now, if his paper passes. And we’ll be keeping close tabs and hope to speak to his professor soon, who is still alive. You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.