BLACKBOARDS AS BILLBOARDS

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Susie's day at Anyschool, U.S.A., begins with a geography lesson in which she locates major cities according to where Tootsie Rolls are made and sold. Then she turns to her reading: if her class makes enough progress in The Berenstain Bears at the Teen Rock Cafe, they will win a party at the local Pizza Hut. Her science lesson--Scientists and the Alaskan Oil Spill--comes to her courtesy of none other than Exxon.

In today's classrooms, corporate logos and learning often go hand in hand. A 1995 report by Consumers Union found that many of America's 43 million school-age children are being bombarded by a growing number of blatantly commercial messages. Channel One, with two minutes of advertising for every 10 minutes of news, plays in more than 12,000 schools, while more than 58,000 schools participated in Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! National Reading Incentive Program this year. Financially strapped and desperate to spice up their curriculums, teachers may find irresistible the slick materials from the likes of Tootsie Roll and Disney jamming their mailboxes. "It's a lesson plan in a can," says Robert Paulis, a high school teacher in Parachute, Colorado, who showed the Exxon video along with one made by marine biologists. "Everyone needs one of those sometimes, but you have to be discreet about what you are showing."

The companies supplying these materials are thinking less about discretion than discretionary income: last year children ages four to 12 spent about $17 billion on food, clothes and toys, while their parents spent hundreds of billions more on their behalf. Where some see students, others see captive consumers. Brian Bice, president of Jordan Education Media in Portland, Oregon, which has developed programs for Disney and Hi-C, says it is naive to think businesses will just write checks to help out schools. "The private sector will be more eager to support education in the form of teaching materials, provided they're allowed to take a bow," he says.

Some teachers are grateful for the freebies. Sandra Hopkins, who has only $500 a year to spend on supplies for her second-graders in Slatington, Pennsylvania, says information sent to her by such groups as the National Dairy Council is often more up to date than that in many textbooks. "I feel I have the knowledge to filter out and use only material focused toward my curriculum," Hopkins says.

But do the children? Consider "Read-A-Logo," put out by Teacher Support Software and used by 3,800 kindergartners in Texas' Cypress-Fairbanks School District. "Taco Bell has [blank] and burritos," one test sentence runs. Insists Suzanne Thompson, early-childhood coordinator for the district: "They have been going to Taco Bell since long before kindergarten. This connects to their prior learning." But Alex Molnar, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of a book on corporations in the classroom, argues that "the long-term impact is to undermine and trivialize the curriculum."

The National PTA and the National Education Association, among others, are alarmed about the trend and are pressing for new guidelines. Meantime, it is up to individual teachers to recognize the junk in their junk mail.

--By Elizabeth Gleick. Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/New York

With reporting by SHARON E. EPPERSON/NEW YORK