Teachers Learn Value of Gifts for Good Grades : Education: Most see coupons, free passes as aids to incentive. Others fear their mixed signals, commercialism.

Thirty years ago, students who performed well in school were recognized with a coveted spot on the honor roll or a shiny gold star on a spelling test. Now, good work or behavior brings material as well as psychic payoffs: It is rewarded with a Dodgers T-shirt, a free pass to Disneyland or a coupon for a hamburger.

In Orange County and across the nation, these tokens have become as commonplace as lunch recess, especially in elementary schools. Teachers and principals, by and large, welcome the free merchandise, grateful for anything that can help them wage what they often feel is an uphill battle to spark and hold students’ interest in learning.

“It’s not like we’re giving them microwaves and TVs,” said Sheila Benecke, a school board member in Capistrano Unified School District, whose schools reward students with coupons from local businesses selling products ranging from ice cream to surfing gear. “If little rewards like hamburgers encourage positive behavior and academic achievement, then we say, ‘Go for it.’ ”

But the trend toward using material things as rewards and incentives, for anything from outstanding academic or athletic performance to good behavior, is causing concern and criticism. Some scholars worry that dispensing backpacks, candy and frozen yogurt will destroy one of the greatest gifts of education: learning to love knowledge for its own sake, rather than for the prizes it brings.

Others who study education object to what the free merchandise carries into the classroom: corporate marketing messages. They show up both in the things companies offer and in lesson plans that they design and provide for free, prominently featuring their products.

When schools reward good students with coupons for hamburgers from Carl’s Jr., for instance, or when they use a lesson on nutrition from Chef Boyardee, they allow students to be exploited by companies who want to pitch their products and cultivate an impressionable and increasingly lucrative market, critics say.

“Children are a captive audience, and here we have an outside force which is not accountable to anyone allowed to deliver its messages unhindered,” said Grace Foster, vice president for education for the California PTA.

“Should schools be a place where anyone can intrude to get a message to children? Or should schools be sacrosanct, where we educate children without indoctrinating them?”

Companies that provide products and lesson plans to schools freely admit that they derive advertising and public relations benefits from doing so. But they say the schools benefit too, because they offer things with genuine instructional or motivational value.

Carl’s Jr., the Anaheim-based hamburger chain with stores in four western states, gives thousands of “incentive certificates”--coupons for free burgers, fries and drinks--to schools each year, to be used as rewards for various kinds of achievement or behavior. They also encourage middle and high schools to hold fund-raisers at their restaurants, donating back to the school 20% of what participants spend there.

“Hopefully because of the goodwill the program provides, people might want to come back and give us their business,” said company spokeswoman Patty Parks. “It’s a good will program, but at the same time, we are a business and we don’t need to apologize for being in business.”

Carl’s also provides free lemonade, dispensers and cups emblazoned with the Carl’s logo for PTA meetings and back-to-school nights. And it distributes to teachers workbooks that include lessons on telling time (noting that a Carl’s Jr. restaurant manager starts his day at 5 a.m.) and counting money (featuring an open Carl’s Jr. cash register) as well as a reading comprehension section which tells the history of how Carl Karcher founded the business.

Chili’s Grill & Bar, a national restaurant chain based in Dallas, distributes 7,000 to 10,000 “Golden Pepper” coupons each year in Orange County schools, entitling students to a free child’s meal.

“There’s an incentive for us because it provides promotion and awareness of our restaurant, but it’s a win-win situation because it also works for the schools,” said Paul Odanaka, Chili’s director for Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“When the kids come in (to redeem the coupons) they get public recognition for what they have achieved. Kids used to get enough attention from schools and parents, but everyone’s stretched so thin, no one has enough time. Maybe Golden Pepper awards can replace some of that.”

Carl’s and Chili’s are hardly alone in offering food, other products or instructional materials to schools. Hunt-Wesson Foods Inc., the Fullerton-based firm that makes Peter Pan peanut butter and Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, provides at the request of teachers packets of cards and booklets describing how peanuts and popcorn are grown, including recipes that use both products. Disneyland offers free passes or merchandise to students or entire classes.

AT&T; is running a program in 5,000 high schools across the country, including Southern California, which provides college-bound students with folders containing applications for long-distance calling cards and posters urging them to call home often, along with pointers on how to adjust to college life, manage their finances and resolve disputes with roommates.

American Home Foods, which makes Chef Boyardee frozen pizza and canned ravioli, as well as PAM cooking spray and other foods, sends representatives to conventions for home economics teachers, where they pass out proposed lesson plans on nutrition. The materials mention that pizza can make a nutritious snack, and repeatedly suggest using PAM to reduce fat in cooking.

“Teachers are crying for this information,” said Joyce Greenberg, spokeswoman for New York-based American Home Foods. “They are on such strict budgets and want to teach, and they often can’t afford other materials.”

Charles Murray, a conservative scholar on social policy issues with the American Enterprise Institute, said he believes corporate involvement in the schools is not only “healthy,” but necessary in times of shrinking school budgets.

He cited cooperative programs in which schools can get computers if their students turn in enough sales receipts from local supermarkets. Such programs encourage families to patronize the markets, he said, but the benefit to the school outweighs the marketing pitch.

James A. Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School District, said that the delicate seesaw of who benefits most weighs on his mind frequently.

“I often wonder whether corporations receive more in benefit than do the children,” he said. “It’s always something we’re examining. These are entrepreneurs. They will push to the limit. It’s up to public school educators to be responsible and judicious about any encroachment of commercialism we allow into the classroom.”

Alex Molnar, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is writing a book about corporate involvement in the schools, says products and advertising messages have proliferated in the schools in the past few decades.

“It creates a dynamic which is the equivalent of an arms race in the schools,” Molnar said. “If you are Burger King, and McDonald’s is doing it, you’d better start. If you’re Reebok, and Nike is doing it, you’d better start. You now have a more or less unrestrained marketing frenzy going on in the schools.”

Marketing firms that design in-school advertising campaigns for companies make no secret of the fact that they are targeting a youthful market.

Lifetime Learning Systems, a Connecticut marketing firm that concentrates on reaching the school-age population, put it this way in an ad in Advertising Age magazine: “They’re ready to spend and we reach them! Kids spend 40 percent of each day in the classroom, where traditional advertising can’t reach them. Now, you can enter the classroom through custom made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind. Communicate with young spenders directly, and through them, their teachers and parents as well.”

Don Lay, president of Lifetime, says he has no qualms about marketing products to children because he always makes sure the materials he develops for clients provide a genuinely valuable educational service. He cited one recent account, for Bic pens, which produced classroom posters prominently featuring the Bic logo and name. The posters also list essay-writing tips for students.

“We have a very fine line we have to walk,” Lay said. “I would walk away from a client before I would design materials that blatantly say, ‘Go out and buy our product.’ I really feel we’re doing a lot of good. We’re not just hawking someone’s product.”

Some teachers may use study materials like Bic’s, and some may pass out coupons for hamburgers. But others dig into their own pockets to provide things like candy, stickers, or even backpacks, to students who behave well, or read more books than those that were assigned.

Herschel Hill, who teaches fourth and fifth grades at Hoover Elementary in Santa Ana, where many children come from low-income families, says material rewards help reinforce a child’s behavior or self-esteem. He gives students brightly colored pencils or folders, which he buys with his own money, or sometimes coupons donated by McDonald’s.

“These kids need constant reinforcement and praise, and there’s only so far you can go with emotional and verbal support,” Hill said. “The family system has changed. Many kids are coming from one-parent families, or families where both parents work. They don’t see the parents much. And they can’t afford these things. They need that something extra.”

That argument infuriates Elliot W. Eisner. A professor of education and art at Stanford University, Eisner said those who use material rewards--whether financed by teachers or by corporations with a marketing message--are using a “short-term, ill-advised and expedient” way to get students’ attention.

“Those kinds of rewards are not what education is about,” Eisner said. “It should be about the satisfaction that comes from mastery, deeper understanding.

“I’m not happy that some teachers and administrators don’t have the gumption, professional insight or sophistication to understand that this kind of procedure is not in the best interests of youngsters,” Eisner said. “You don’t generate interest among students with hamburgers, Cokes and chicken. The idea of education is to build a system that is genuinely meaningful to their lives.”

Alfie Kohn, a former teacher who writes extensively on using rewards to motivate children, said teachers believe that using material rewards and incentives will bolster students’ enthusiasm for learning. But he cited research showing that it actually undermines a child’s motivation.

In one study, preschoolers who were promised a reward for drawing with colored markers lost interest as soon as they got the reward, but those promised nothing enjoyed the activity for much longer. In another study, young children drank Kefir, a yogurt drink. Those who were promised nothing still liked the drink when it was offered a week later, but those who were praised or promised movie tickets for drinking it the first time rejected the drink when it was offered later.

“The tendency to bribe children to behave the way we want and to learn is a tempting but ultimately destructive strategy,” Kohn said. “Rewards can never help children develop a long-term commitment to the values that interest us, or to learning itself. The more we rely on rewards, the less children are likely to value learning for its own sake.”

To teachers on the front lines every day, however, that reasoning sounds idealistic. Linda Oliver, a 22-year veteran who teaches third grade in Anaheim, says students absorb very well what they see in the ultimate material society, where if you do well, you get the goods.

Children have become so accustomed to receiving material things for performing well that teachers feel pressure to provide a little something, Oliver said. She passes out sugarless candy. She believes it encourages them without destroying the idea that learning is valuable in its own right.

“This isn’t the 1950s anymore,” Oliver said. “We’re into a little different regime of kids in the ‘90s. My students say, ‘I did this, now what do I get?’ and sometimes instead of candy, I say, ‘The satisfaction of doing it right.’ And they laugh at me. But I think they know I’m right.”