NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (503) 235-8012
For Immediate Release: June 28th, 2005
Today’s House Hearing on Private Sector Involvement in Schools is a Whitewash
Today, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Education Reform is conducting a hearing on “How the Private Sector is Helping States and Communities Improve High School Education.” Following is Commercial Alert Executive Director Gary Ruskin’s statement on today’s hearing:
“While nearly all would agree that schools need more “support,” “private sector involvement” in the schools these days largely means corporate marketing to captive students, or using schools as public relations props and backdrops.”
“Missing from today’s hearing will be any examination of the more insidious aspect of the commercialization of schools, such as: how corporations take away school time for corporate marketing, or how their in-school marketing has helped to generate an epidemic of childhood obesity, or how corporate wrongdoers like Microsoft use the schools to drum up some good public relations.”
“If businesses really want to help “reform” local high schools, they can pay their taxes, stop negotiating special tax breaks, and give back their corporate welfare.”
More information about today’s hearing is available at: http://edworkforce.house.gov/mediaadvisory.htm
Commercial Alert is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy. For more information, see our website at: http://www.commercialalert.org.