Honig Gives an ‘F’ to Education TV Show With Ads

State schools Supt. Bill Honig issued a negative report card Thursday for Channel One, a controversial, satellite-delivered television show that introduces commercials to the classroom.

“Our students’ minds aren’t for sale,” Honig said in Anaheim as he announced that public schools would not be allowed to collect state money for the time that students spend watching the program.

In March, Tennessee-based Whittle Communications introduced Channel One’s pilot project in five high schools and one junior high across the nation, including Gahr High School in Cerritos. The 5-week program ended last month. Whittle planned to expand the program to 8,000 schools nationally if it proved successful.

Honig said, however, that his department has examined the legal and ethical merits of Channel One and decided that it constitutes “forced commercialization in school.”

He said Channel One does not qualify as an “educational activity” and therefore is inconsistent “with the purpose for which schools are established.”

“On the whole, it’s a bad deal for kids, a bad deal for education, and it sets a terrible precedent,” Honig said at a press conference at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers, where he was taking part in an awards ceremony for California schools.

If California public schools choose to take the program, Honig said they will be docked state money commensurate with the total number of hours that students view the show.

Whittle Communications’ 12-minute program, viewed daily in the pilot project, was a lively international news show with enthusiastic young announcers. It was the 2 minutes of commercials--for products such as Snickers candy bars, Levi’s jeans and Gillette razors--that concerned educators.

Whittle Communications said it was prepared to make a $100-million investment to equip schools with TV monitors in each classroom, satellite dishes and video recorders.

“What that basically bought is our kids’ minds,” Honig said. “We can’t sell them.”

David Jarrard, spokesman for Whittle Communications in Knoxville, said California is the only state where there has been official opposition to Channel One.

“We respectfully, strongly disagree on the interpretation of state law” in this instance, he said. “We did this in six schools across the country, and the response in these schools, including Cerritos, has been remarkable in how positive it is, even more so than we expected.

“It’s interesting: The further away you get from the classroom, the more esoteric the arguments get.”

But Irvine Unified School District Supt. David Brown--who attended Honig’s press conference along with Betty Lindsey, president of the California PTA--said that to allow ads on school TVs “implies an endorsement. It tends to turn our classrooms into salesrooms.”

Brown, who is also vice president of the Assn. of California School Administrators, said state school officials oppose using commercial satellite news programs in the classroom.

Assailed by Interest Groups

Even before Channel One began its pilot program, it met with strong opposition from school and children’s interest groups. The National PTA and Action for Children’s Television strongly condemned TV ads in the classroom.

“We’ve done a lot of work with television viewing, and we know the impact it has on young people,” Lindsey said.

“Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they are affected by commercials telling them to go out and buy something.

“We applaud the partnership between business and education. But when that partnership depends on how many Nike tennis shoes they can sell, on how many McDonald’s hamburgers they sell, we say, ‘Whoa. No.’ ”

Broad Support at Gahr

At Gahr High, the 5-week experiment has met with broad support among students, the principal and even the local PTA, school officials have said.

On Thursday, Gahr guidance counselor Elsa Martinez called Honig’s opinion “unfortunate” but said the school would abide by it.

“The issue was the captive audience for commercials,” Martinez said. “Our experience was that when the commercials went on, the youngsters began chatting and didn’t even pay attention.

“The educational programming was very well done,” she said.