.
| Hearsay: |
Hell yes. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m so sick of this shit that I’ve started hiding the flyers when they come into the house. They get filed under blue moments after they come out of the bag. Or, if Ninja Boy sees them first, he gets to keep them, but refers to them as his “magazines”. I feel like he’s losing IQ points just by browsing that catalogue o’ schlock. Apparently a group in the US feels much the same way.
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group based in Boston, said that it had reviewed monthly fliers distributed by Scholastic last year and found that one-third of the items sold in these brochures were either not books or books packaged with other items.
Based on a review of brochures in Scholastic’s Lucky Club for children in second and third grade, and its Arrow Club for fourth through sixth graders, the group said that 14 percent of the items were not books, while an additional 19 percent were books sold with other trinkets like stickers, posters and toys.
Susan Linn, director of the campaign, said she had received complaints from parents who were concerned that their children were being sold toys, games, makeup and other items under the guise of a literary book club that is promoted in classrooms.
“Marketing in schools is a privilege and not a right,” Ms. Linn said in an interview. “Scholastic is abusing that privilege.”
I love this part:
“We work with teachers to make sure that items are O.K. to put out in their classrooms,” Ms. Newman said. “In a class of 24 kids, some of them will be turned on by a game, and it helps kids engage in the book club process.”
Very revealing. Um, how about helping them become engaged with BOOKS instead of “the book club process”? How about teaching them to love words instead of to become mindless consumers?
January 2006
December
2005
November
2005
October
2005
September
2005
August
2005
July
2005
June
2005
May
2005
April
2005
March
2005
February
2005
January
2005
December
2004
November
2004
October
2004
September
2004
August
2004
July
2004
June
2004
May
2004
April
2004
March
2004
February
2004
January
2004
December
2003
November
2003
October
2003
September
2003
August
2003
Bookninja © Copyright
The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners,
organizers, or other participants.
[powered by WordPress.]
February 10th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Same in our house. I do a quick look-through to see if there are actual books in it (not tied to movie or TV shows) and then toss it. Such a wasted opportunity to put books in homes.
February 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am
That’s too bad. I remember the Scholastic brochures being the highlight of the month! I loved ordering books, as many as my mother would let me. And the book fairs! Oh, I was in heaven! I do remember there being a lot of things like stickers with books, and coloring books with markers, stuff like that. And this was probably 25+ years ago. So it’s nothing new, just worse than it was then, more commercial (we certainly had few movie tie-ins…maybe Old Yeller or something!)
February 10th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I’ve always wondered how Scholastic manages to get their flyers into the schools. I’m the PR volunteer for a local non-profit cross country ski hill and we’re not allowed to put up our flyers in our local schools.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Gem: The schools get a percentage of the sales to spend on books for classroom libraries. I notice they call them “points” in the NY Times.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
My wife is very careful to look over the flyers and only orders the books that fit the goals for our childs reading. He gets input of course, but she tries to steer him clear of the fluff and sales gimmicks so that he will embrace the books…not the spiffy little trinkets.
Still…kids do love stickers.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Yes, but they shouldn’t link them to books like prizes in a cereal box. If the “value-added content” of a book comes outside the text, you have to wonder how valuable the text is.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Ooh…and I forgot to mention. I still have a bunch of the books I ordered from Scholastic book club in the ’70s. Johnny Tremaine was one of my favourites, and Where the Wild Things Are captured my imagination.
February 10th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
George: From a business perspective, I very much disagree with that statement. The best movie publishers are able to afford a lot of advertising for their products, because of the related merchandise that they are willing to licence to non-movie companies, such as those that produce lunch boxes, stickers, t-shirts, etc. None of those items need compromise the quality of the works that book publishers themselves through book stores make available for purchase to the public. But book publishers are generally too poor to afford advertising, because of their own self-defeating attitude that pretends to be allergic to the idea of licencing to other companies book related merchandise. Who suffers the most from their lack of good business acumen? The authors whose books they are supposedly proud to have published, that’s who. Thus, they are killing the geese that lays for them the golden eggs. They have ridiculously begun to expect for authors that do not have any talent for marketing, to properly market the books that they have authored, but the end result is usually pathetic, and humiliating for the authors themselves because many times in terms of marketing they absolutely do not know at all what it is they are doing, or what it is that needs to be done. It can be very reasonably argued that such an inappropriate expectation has begun to result in the end of the book publishing industry itself.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
So Scholastic essentially pays the schools to access the much-valued parent/children market. Wow.
How many other companies would love to be able to do so? Given the market is fairly lucrative, you’d think that companies would be bidding against each other to access it through the schools. Why aren’t schools auctioning off the access? And if they auction it off, what would be the rules around the products that could be sold?
February 11th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Thankfully my kids are old enough that they don’t get that stuff anymore. But I can’t tell you how cross I’d get when I’d give them $20 for Book Club, and they’d come home with erasers, pens with fluff on top, key-chains and sundry crap, but not a single book.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I was a little annoyed when all the Offspring wanted to buy was the trinkets. But now they have to buy out of their allowance, it doesn’t bother me so much. Both are very engaged and advanced readers, they have so many books they have to purge the shelves twice a year to make room for anything new, I still read to them for an hour every night, I still take them to the library every week. Maybe I just got lucky, or maybe giving them free rein helped, I don’t know.
February 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
It probably won’t make it much better to many of you, but the points that Scholastic gives go directly to the classroom teacher, not the school. Only certain items are redeemable with the points, mostly books and teacher’s guides. It is a benefit to the classroom, although it did always disappoint me how many nonbook items were available. What I found worse, though, was the Scholastic “News” magazines (like Weekly Reader) that was almost always an advertisement for their big item book or a related movie.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I agree with some of these comments, there are alot of trinkets featured, but I wonder if responsibility is unfairly being relegated to just Scholastic. Isn’t it ultimately up to a parent to purchase or not purchase product from Book Club? If a child wants junk, can’t a parent say no or suggest an alternative? When I was in school my parents monitored what I bought, if i wanted something from Scholastic it had to be educational, end of story. In the end, Scholastic is a business… also from a marketing standpoint, doesn’t selling trinkets drive up profit so that the prices of books sold on Book Club remain at a low price point? From what I’ve noticed lots of classics and quality books are sold at really reasonable prices.
February 18th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Part of the problem, Mims, is that Scholastic is being invited into the classroom under the guise of being a wholesome retailer of books. However, as the above comments point out, Scholastic is taking advantage of its unique position (name one other group that’s allowed to market to elementary school classes, let alone encouraged to do so by the instructors) to market utter rubbish that is wholly unrelated to their stated goal of selling books to children. Yes, Scholastic sells some wonderful books at a great price (which I took full advantage of as a kid), but they’re also abusing their privilege, and people are started to object rather vocally to this practice.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Scholastic would not put those items in the flyers if they did not sell. Ultimately, parents are the ones that pay for the items, so the discretion should be up to them. There are a high number of high quality books at low prices. I do not know when the last time you bought a picture book at a bookstore is, but the prices our outragous, up to twenty dollars. If you ask me scholastic benefits students, parents, and teachers.
February 26th, 2009 at 9:14 am
I think the big question, Amy, isn’t whether or not they sell, and thus are a wise business move, but rather whether Scholastic should be given access to such a captive market. Society, as a whole, is very protective of children in schools, and normally does not allow them to be advertised to and marketed to. However, we do allow Scholastic this access because they do it under the guise of promoting reading. So, if their focus on reading materials is wavering, should we still allow them exclusive access to our children?