I’m just wondering. Is the concern over the reward being McDonalds with all of its unhealthiness, the exclusion of other brands, or is it because it’s a brand, period?
Because I can kinda understand the first (although no one would force a kid to get a double quarter pounder).
The second is justifiable–if marketing is to be allowed in the schoolhouse, no one company should have a monopoly. Perhaps if this program is going to be continued, other vendors should be solicited.
But the third point, I can’t agree. School children have always been rewarded with brands, and I can’t see it ever stopping. Nor do I think it should. I remember getting free or discounted Scholastic books in school. When we had fundraisers, we sold chocolate from World’s Finest Chocolate. On field trips, our classes would always go to the Varsity for lunch. Pizza parties were always hosted by Dominoes (bleh!). I remember an assembly where all the kids received little Snuggles (the little bear on the fabric softner box). Then there was the time Bruce Erion from 11Alive News landed his helicopter on our playground and entertained us. Were we being groomed as future consumers? You bet. But did all of this make school more fun? Yeah!
I’m thinking if the reward had been a gift certificate to Barnes and Nobles, the parent wouldn’t have been outraged. I think most people would agree that this is a better reward for a school to give out, but then that throws all the talk about “branding” out of the window.
Nah, you’d run into somebody who had a smaller local bookstore that went out of business after B&N came to town, who has ever since hated Big Corporate Monopolies and wants to discourage folks from using them. Outrage hath no end.
Look, no one is stopping McDonalds from giving out all the quarter pounders they want. All they have done is taken the school out of the equation. Why should my tax dollars go towards pimping for some corporate whore? If McDonalds wants to purchase their own advertising time and say "Bring your report card in and you’ll get a free happy meal for every “A”, there would be no grounds for complaint.
Whe I was a kid there was a bowling alley that would give you a free line of bowling for every “A”. The school had nothing to do with it, and why should they have?
Yeah, my objection to this is pretty much the whole “This report card brought to you by McDonald’s!” aspect of it. The Mickey Dee’s in my hometown actually had a program very similar to what Bill Door just suggested; if you brought in your report card, you could get free stuff for the As on it. Why does the McDonald’s logo need to be plastered all over the report cards? It’s marketing to a captive audience, and I think it sucks.
We had Channel One in my high school too, by the way, and it made me completely irrationally enraged at the time and still kind of does when I think about it. The “news” and other content was a bunch of overprocessed meaningless fluff, and the whole thing was just a giant vehicle for the advertising content, which as stated earlier in this thread, was not optional viewing. We were marked tardy if we didn’t show up in time for the start of Channel One.
I’m not crazy about it, either, but I don’t think it stinks that much. And I’d bet that your tax dollars don’t pay for it. My guess is that either McDonald’s took over the cost of the report card covers or they’ve given the school some other consideration for the access to the students. I’d be happy if schools didn’t feel the need to do this, for whatever financial consideration, but it does bug me that the one upset parent got the whole thing cancelled for everybody. When you’re dealing with groups of people, sometime you just have to learn that not everybody does things the same way you do. But this parent, instead of telling her child “We don’t do that in this family” spoiled it for all the rest of the kids.
Maybe we can have two sets of public schools – one for people who will sell the souls of their children for four chicken nuggets, a small fry, a soda, and a crappy plastic toy tie in to the latest crappy movie, and one set of schools for people who think schools should have any integrity. Problem solved.
Do you have something to back this assertion up? It seems more likely that these coupons are passed out for the same reason as most other promotions. You give a kid a free meal and sell three meals to the rest of the family.
Maybe he should have said “anecdotal evidence included.” 'Cos there’s plenty here in the thread. Look at all the posters who have fond-ish memories of the Pizzas for Books promotions sponsored by Pizza Hut.
I’d like to reiterate that I object to the notion of the school district selling access to my daughter.
Heh. When I was a lad, McDonalds sponsored just about every* swim meet we went to. We got rewarded for winning athleticism by being given high-calorie, fatty food.
Of course, we needed all those calories, because of all the swimming. At the time, we had so little body fat that the skin caliper thing was kinda useless, so my team got to do the “dunk 'em in water, and weigh the displacement” thing.
In the summer of '84, between swim meets and McD’s disasterous Olympics promotion, I think I could’ve lived on McDonalds food – for free.
Ironically, I gained weight when I got older – after giving up both swimming and McDonalds. I’ve taken up swimming again, but never regained my taste for McDonalds. So in the long run, I guess their marketing ploy failed although their promoting swimming worked on me.
I forgot to mention that this program is still going strong. The program is 20 years old and in 900,000 classrooms. My kids have been doing it this year. I let them earn the coupon, but since I can’t stand Pizza Hut, we go to our favorite local pizza joint.
I see the view that a report card should not be “sponsored”, but I also know the current state of the school system. There’s a good thread that demonstrates this somewhere on the SDMB about a teacher who now gets $20 a year for his/her class and this doper was elated because the budget was previously $0 a year. So, if McDonalds wants to sponsor the whole damn school what do I care? That’s one less tax dollar I’ll have to pay (well ok I’m sure I’ll still pay it, but now it can go somewhere else).
As many have said, corporate involvement in schools has been around for decades. I remember back in the 80s selling coupons to the neighborhood in attempt to win a jumpsuit or bag or whatever they came up with. In the end the school wins with increased income, the corporations get a little advertising, and I really see no “expense”. I don’t think a McDonalds logo on a report card is going to turn a child to a life of supersized obesity.
Yeah, see, this is why the whole tag line for this board has to change. Can anybody read arguments like this and pretend this board has anything to do with fighting ignorance?
I don’t have a problem with the reward thing, but I agree with the posters who don’t like the whole logo bombardment on the report card itself. That’s taking it a step too far.
