The New York Times
March 21, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Math Book Salted With Brand Names Raises New Alarm

By Constance L. Hays

When his 11-year-old son asked Joe Stein for help with his homework last fall, Mr. Stein got a big surprise. There on the page of his son's sixth-grade math textbook was "what looked like an ad for a chain electronics store," he said. Going through the rest of the book, Mr. Stein discovered references to a wide array of brand-name consumer products, from Nike and Gatorade to Disneyland and Topps baseball cards, many of which appeared in illustrations as well. And that made him angry.

"He has to use this textbook, and he has to do the work that is intertwined with these advertisements," said Mr. Stein, whose son, Noah, attends middle school in Albany, Calif., north of Berkeley. "I found it offensive that the lesson he was learning was about commercialism and how even the school district and other public forums weren't free from this sort of thing. I also wondered who was getting paid for this. I assumed that textbooks wouldn't put this free of charge in the text."

The textbook, "Mathematics: Applications and Connections," published by McGraw-Hill Inc. in 1995 and revised this year, is used in schools in about 15 states, including California and Texas, and has been approved for use in New York City.

But a spokesman for McGraw-Hill said the publisher received no payments from companies whose products appear in the book. "We have no commercial or promotional arrangements to use particular brands," said the spokesman, Neal Allen. One of the book's authors said that the well-known products were included simply to make the math problems more relevant to sixth graders.

Yet critics contend that the textbook amounts to a collection of advertisements that especially because they appear in a book used in the classroom, press specific consumer products onto unsuspecting schoolchildren. The blizzard of name-dropping and product images, along with almost reverential descriptions of the companies, can only make children more brand conscious, they say.

"This looks like product placement, as they do in the movies," said David Walsh, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family, based in Minneapolis, which studies the effect of advertising on families. "The effect is the same. It gets at what I call the golden rule of influence, which is when the person being influenced doesn't even know it."

Mr. Stein, a lawyer for the Federal Government in San Francisco, complained about the 1995 edition of the textbook. The 1999 version remains drenched with product shots and trivia about everything from Barbie dolls (Mattel), Cocoa Frosted Flakes (Kellogg), Sony Play Stations, Spalding basketballs, characters and entertainment sites owned by Disney and Warner Brothers and fast-food fare from Burger King and McDonald's.

Those who oppose salting a textbook with brand names say this is the most egregious example of advertising's steady march through public education.

"This is the first time we've seen advertising in state-subsidized textbooks," said Andrew Hagelshaw, senior program director at the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education in Oakland, Calif. Noting that taxpayer dollars paid for textbooks that school districts bought from McGraw-Hill, he added, "It crosses a line that hasn't been crossed before."

He and others trace the trend of school acceptance of advertising to 1989, when thousands of schools began signing up for free televisions offered by Channel One. In return they had to agree to show their pupils current-affairs programming that included commercials from many consumer product companies eager to pitch their wares to children.

School districts are seen as prime targets by computer software publishers, fast-food chains, soft-drink bottlers and other corporations, which believe that brand loyalty begins at an early age. Some offer schools lucrative contracts intended to promote their products and keep their competitors out.

The McGraw-Hill textbook is intended to turn word problems into real-life situations to better teach the principles of sixth-grade math.

For example, the 1995 edition, still in use in many places, introduces a decimal division problem as follows: "Will is saving his allowance to buy a pair of Nike shoes that cost $68.25. If Will earns $3.25 per week, how many weeks will Will need to save?" To the right of the text is a full-color picture of a pair of Nikes.

Another word problem, this one in the 1999 edition, gives a plug to Oreos, made by Nabisco: "The best-selling packaged cookie in the world is the Oreo cookie," it begins. "The diameter of an Oreo cookie is 1.75 inches. Express the diameter of an Oreo cookie as a fraction in simplest form."

A section on surface area in the same edition asks students to calculate the surface area of a box of Cocoa Frosted Flakes, adding some gratuitous information about when the cereal was introduced. Another page, titled "School to Career," highlights Lands' End, the mail-order apparel company. "Consumers can purchase unique clothing and accessories, and products for the home," the section reads.

Not everyone insists on keeping the schools pure of consumer product information. But the math book goes too far, its critics say, in making references to products and companies so specifically and without any real context.

"If you want children to deal with the real world, tell them to go out there and compare the prices of Nike and Reebok and Adidas and a store brand," suggested Charlotte Baecher, director of the Zillions Education Center at Consumers Union, which tries to sharpen children's awareness about advertising. "Then they will be getting a real lesson, instead of just a reinforcement that Nike is the most popular brand."

She added that the word problem featuring Nike was an effective advertisement. "The whole point of advertising to kids is not about getting any particular message out," she said. "It's about getting that brand name to hit them in all sorts of places."

One of the book's 12 authors, Patricia S. Wilson, an associate professor in the mathematics education department at the University of Georgia, said the brand names were scattered through the book almost unconsciously.

"I don't recall ever actually discussing not using logos," she said. "Certainly, we didn't discuss trying to use logos. It was more the examples that people came up with."

She said she knew of no company that had paid to be included in the book, adding, "What would bother me is if I knew there was some kind of financial agreement with somebody."

One suggestion she did recall was using commercial logos as part of a section on symmetry. "You're trying to get into what people are familiar with, so they can see, hey, mathematics is in the world out there," she said. Putting real-life situations into math problems for sixth graders, she added, "is an important issue -- having products that are interesting to that age group, to hook into where they are."

In California, the attention drawn to the book by Mr. Stein prompted one legislator to sponsor a bill to ban commercial references and logos in school textbooks. In fact, California already has a state guideline intended to prevent such references, but as Mr. Stein's experience shows, it does not always work.

Kerry Mazzoni, chairwoman of the California State Assembly's education committee, introduced the bill in January. She said the state needed to be careful about the messages it sent schoolchildren. "We as a state should not be in a position of promoting one private-sector product over another," she said.

Mr. Allen said that McGraw-Hill, prompted by Ms. Mazzoni's proposal, was "reviewing our policy with regard to screening out corporate logos." And he noted that textbooks were developed and revised in consultation with school committees that make suggestions about what should and should not be included.

In California, the textbook was reviewed for compliance with state guidelines by a county education office, said Doug Stone, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. Because McGraw-Hill originally offered the book free to the state, he added, "it may not have received the thorough scrutiny that it should have gone through."

California has demanded that future editions purchased by its school districts not carry brand names, Mr. Stone said, although he did not know when those editions would be printed.

Permission to use the names and logos of some of the companies mentioned in the math textbook was sought and granted. Anna Rozevich, a spokeswoman for McDonald's, said her company was approached, "but we did not pay to be in the book." McDonald's gave permission for use of its name and logo, she said, because using real products "seemed to have intrinsic educational value for the children."

But apparently no such permission was sought from several other companies regarding their images or statements concerning their products, according to their spokesmen.

Ann Smith, a spokeswoman for Nabisco, said she could find no record of any request. Asked why Oreos might have been chosen for the math book, rather than Hydrox or other similar-looking brands, she said: "They probably wanted to represent something the masses would have knowledge of. Oreo is an American icon."

That the companies did not pay anything for what would seem to be invaluable exposure to impressionable young minds through a school textbook is almost more troubling than if they had, some critics said. They say that fact reveals much about how the battle to keep classrooms free of commercialism has been lost.

"It isn't implausible that a textbook writer simply chose this brand-name product without even thinking about it," said Alex Molnar, who directs the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, referring to the Oreo example. "But somebody ought to catch it."



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