DOE Announces Cannes Festival Lion Titanium Award

As the 2007/08 school year drew to a close, the DOE’s public relations machine churned out a little-noted press release entitled, “Chancellor Klein Hails Department of Education’s Student Motivation Campaign for Winning Cannes Lion Titanium Award for Best ‘Breakthrough Idea’ of 2008.” The “breakthrough idea” turned out not to be an educational initiative or new instructional technology, nor a new concept for school operation or administration. The “breakthrough idea” award was not even for the DOE’s pilot program to give free cell phones to 2,500 students in seven middle schools. Rather, the award celebrated the packaging concepts for the underlying “cell phone minutes as motivator" idea, and it was given not to the DOE but to its advertising agency, Droga5, for its Million Motivation Campaign and The Million cell phone.

The Million? That’s the ostentatious but quietly shepherded name of the DOE’s free cell phone. The name is apparently premised on the idea that the City’s one million public school students from Pre-K-12 (you have to include Pre-K to top one million students in the DOE’s official 10/31/07 register) are all potential recipients. Doubtless among that million are hordes of Pre-K to Grade 4 children whose parents relish the idea of cell phones in their wee ones’ hands, just as there are doubtless equal hordes of NYC high schoolers simply salivating over the prospect of a DOE-monitored and DOE–controlled, limited functionality cell phone.

Back to the award, though. The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival is exactly that – an advertising industry awards extravanza. Winners are chosen not for the merits of their products or programs but for their promotional packaging effectiveness. Otherwise, the DOE’s free cell phone idea would certainly have difficulty standing next to some of its competitors this year: anti-smoking, homelessness, HIV testing, Down Syndrome, environmental awareness, and drinking water shortages in the less-developed world, to name several. Droga5’s, and by inference the DOE’s, Titanium Award was not granted by experts in the field of academics, but by experts in the arts of style over substance, of emotion and misdirection over logic and content. A truly fitting award, indeed, for the City’s current educational regime.

A look at Droga5’s video submission (it's worth watching the whole thing) to the Cannes Lion Festival makes it clear why the advertising industry was so enamored of their campaign. Yes, it’s graphically slick, as expected from an agency whose client list includes Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Adidas, ecko unltd., and MTV. Better from an advertising standpoint, though, are the prominent displays of the names Samsung and Verizon on the cell phone itself. Better still are the “rewards” programs, featuring among others AMC Theaters, Adidas, Apple Computer, Macy’s, Foot Locker, Sean John, Virgin Megastores, all members of an innocuously described “responsible, on-screen corporate partnership” whose participation ensures that “The Million pays for itself.”

What branded product executive wouldn’t positively drool at the prospect of reaching into the purported Million young minds every day through a free, school system certified, advertising message delivery system? No wonder the folks at Cannes handed The Million its Titanium award -- they could probably barely contain themselves over the prospect of a captive student cell phone rollout across America’s major urban school systems. In Droga5’s video, DOE’s Chief Equality Officer Roland Fryer was already alluding to inquiry calls from the Chicago and Houston public school systems. The video closes with gushing accolades from the education experts at Esquire Magazine (a Droga5 client), Conde Nast, and (wonder of wonders!) Bloomberg News.

The DOE also proudly announced that The Million program was piloted in seven middle schools this year (starting back in February). While those schools are seldom if ever mentioned by name, The Million’s own website identifies four of the seven as KIPP charter schools – Academy Charter, A.M.P. Charter, Infinity Charter, and S.T.A.R. College Preparatory. The remaining three are Ebbetts Field Middle School (K352), JHS 234 - Arthur Cunningham (K234), and IS 349 – Math, Science & Tech (K349), all in Brooklyn. All three of the non-charter middle schools received grades of B on their last year’s School Progress Reports. Although the cell phone rewards were ostensibly connected to positive student behaviors, all three schools declined from between 0.2% to 1.0% in attendance rate this year compared to last year. All three schools did, however, show positive increases in the percentage of students who scored proficient (3 or 4) on the Math and ELA exams despite noticeable longitudinal (cohort) declines from Grade 7 to Grade 8 in Math (-9%) and ELA (-12%) at Math, Science & Tech and a smaller decline (-4%) in Math from Grade 6 to Grade 7 at Ebbetts Field.

The DOE’s press release closed with the declaration that, “Pending available funding, the plot will grow to reach 10,000 students during the 2008-09 school year.” Funding from which corporate sponsor(s), do you think?

The million program: DOE's new cell phone project as ingenious marketing tool?

See the article in Advertising Age, revealing a new twist in the DOE project, originally devised by Roland Fryer to offer cell phones to students, supposedly as an incentive to improve their academic performance.

It’s now being branded as “The Million program” – referring to the 1.1 million students in the NYC public schools. This proposal was originally described as an “experiment” but is now said to involve 10,000 to 11,000 students in its first year alone - and is apparently being pitched to potential sponsors as a way to market their products to all NYC students in the near future.

According to David Droga, an ad maven involved in the project, who revealed details to Advertising Age's Idea Conference last Thursday,

“There'll also be some room for advertising on the phone. After all, the phones, while provided for free to the students, won't be completely without cost. As such, marketers will be able to infiltrate the students' world through "responsible" sponsorships….There's lots and lots of brands out there that have a place in the students' lives," said Mr. Droga, who wouldn't disclose the specific advertisers because of ongoing negotiations.”

There may also be product “discounts” offered in text messages, according to Droga – a good way to sell more products.

So let me get this straight: this administration will continue to deny cell phones to students who need to communicate with their parents on their way to or from school, or in case of an emergency. But they will be offered as a way to sell them products?

This project is quickly turning into a potential goldmine for some lucky advertising agency as well as a host of possible commercial sponsors, and yet another opportunity to drain the pockets of NYC kids and their parents.

Bling instead of books: how low can they go?

Every time you think the DOE can’t stoop any lower they do.

Roland Fryer’s experiment, originally supposed to be small-scale and privately funded, has now mushroomed into an expensive project to provide tens of thousands of students with cell phones, free tickets to sports games, and text messages from famous athletes and rappers --– to “convince” them that staying in school and working hard is worthwhile.

Because the ban on carrying cell phones to school will continue, students will still be unable to communicate with their parents, or be alerted in case of an emergency , but celebrities will be able to text message them at home. See the Inside Schools blog on this:

This week's plan, according to the Times, is to have famous people, such as Jay-Z and LeBron James, send poor New York City kids text messages telling them to stay in school. Really. Because a rap artist who dropped out of high school and a basketball player who skipped college for a multi-million-dollar professional contract are the perfect figures to teach kids about the long-term benefits of doing well in school.

Here is an excerpt from the NY Times article describing the rationale for this project:

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said the project was the city’s first attempt to bring about change in the culture and behavior of low-performing students after years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching.

“How do you get people to think about achievement in communities where, for historical or other reasons, there isn’t necessarily demand for that,” Mr. Klein said yesterday in an interview. “We want to create an environment where kids know education is something you should want. Some people come to school with an enormous appetite for learning and others do not — that’s the reality.”…. Dr. Fryer said he viewed the project in economic terms, arguing that while the administration’s previous efforts have focused on changing the “supply” at schools, this one is proposing to change the “demand” for education by making students want to seek learning.

“You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody wants it, it doesn’t matter,” Dr. Fryer said.

If Fryer thinks that NYC schools are the “best product in the world,” he must be blind. And Klein says there have been “years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching”!

Just yesterday, the Daily News revealed the fact that at the ACORN high school, which received a “F,” every student is forced to share a text book with five others. Why don’t we start on providing kids with books, before we move on to bling?

I know Fryer just recently arrived from Harvard, but are the rest of these guys so insulated from reality in their chandeliered palace that they don’t know how overcrowded and deprived most of our classrooms really are?

Here are the words of Ms. Frizzle on the latest twisted scheme coming out of Tweed:

The blame here is so misplaced it is unbelievable. If motivation is the issue, perhaps the city would do well to take a look around the schools we ask poor children to attend. In mine, at least, a building that serves grades K-8, they eat in a nasty-smelling, ugly-as-hell cafeteria, learn in classrooms that are perpetually uncomfortable because someone cannot figure out how to heat our building properly (we’re talking upwards of 80 degrees with the windows open in the winter), … The school building - despite the efforts of those of us who work there - lacks the kind of magic that inspires, lacks the comforts that communicate care and importance - and let’s be frank here, the kids are needy as hell and there is never enough… never enough mental health services, never enough school supplies, never enough teacher attention, never enough paraprofessionals. Classes need to be smaller so each one of these kids can get the attention he or she needs to make up for very real challenges that accompany being poor in the richest city on earth. School buildings need to say “You are welcome and cared for here and will enjoy the time you spend here, and what happens here is our priority.” And then, when we’ve made our schools beautiful and filled with the talented people and plentiful resources to provide what children need in order to do well, only then we can turn our attention to whatever gaps in motivation might exist and start sending out edgy little cellphone messages about the value of education. Christ.

It’s kind of startling, the amount of effort, time and money going into this “rebranding” campaign – but I guess when you’ve given up actually trying to improve schools, as they seem to have done at Tweed, what’s left? If you run Tweed via PR, you think that’s PR is all that exists.

It’s like Karl Rove, who said: ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”

So which students at which schools are going to be offered the thousands of new tickets, cell phones and the rest? Those attending KIPP and New Visions schools. I thought these schools were already so expert at motivating students…but I guess not. If nothing else, this will probably lead to a surge of applicants, so they can even more effectively skim off the top.

And I guess we’ll just continue to disregard all those hundreds of thousands of students, left attending our large, overcrowded high schools, in classes of 30 or more, with not enough books, not enough desks, and not enough attention from their teachers. In time, they will eventually figure out that nobody in power real cares enough about the quality of their education so they might as well drop out or in other ways disengage. But it won't be the fault of those at Tweed, because as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and every other billionaire knows, NYC schools are already the best product in the world.