Corporate Sponsorship in Schools: Pros and Cons

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For many years, corporations have sponsored schools in the United States. Students and faculty can find corporate advertisements all over the school; on jerseys, uniforms, equipment, and even school buses. Corporate sponsorships bring money to cash-strapped schools that desperately need money, but these ads also bring distractions to students. Students deserve the best education the school board can provide them and these corporate sponsorships bring many distractions and annoyance to students. Schools should not allow corporate sponsorships into their schools if they do not bring the best benefits to students. Although corporate sponsorships bring a small number of benefits, the school board should provide an environment free from ads and
Textbooks that these corporations provide for students contain false, incorrect information and are added to these textbooks in order to make these corporations seem better. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser states that “The spiraling cost of textbooks has led to thousands of American school districts to use corporate sponsored teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumers Union found that 80 percent were biased; proving students will incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor’s products and views. Procter & Gamble’s Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was actually good for the environment…said that fossil fuels created few environmental problems and that alternative sources of energy were too expensive” (55). These textbooks contain biased info that is used to benefit the corporation, which ends up teaching students incorrect information about the environment and the rest of the world, leading to false education for these students. Although corporate sponsorship means the students will receive textbooks and other useful equipment, which some schools desperately need, they will be receiving false information that won’t benefit them in the future. Some people say that giving the students
Corporations push their products toward students all day and then when they go home, they feel the desire to buy more of these products. Students begin to form strong bonds with these corporations, such as McDonalds or other fast food restaurants, and then they end up continuously buying and eating their food because they see it everywhere, even at school, making them believe that buying their products is the right choice. Chick-Fil-A sponsors Austin High School Theater and although Chick-Fil-A is not as unhealthy as some other fast food restaurants, Theater doesn’t get a lot of profit from this sponsorship, which doesn’t give their organization a lot of money. This shows that although schools believe that corporate sponsorship gives them a lot of money, this isn’t always the case and sometimes you end up losing more money than you began with in the first place. Also, in Fast Food Nation, Coca-Cola gave an awful deal to a school, so when they tried to sponsor Coca-Cola, the school didn’t meet the certain amount of sales they had to

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