A recent article from Newsweek titled "New! Improved! Its School!" discusses the new trend of selling school to kids. This article, that was published in late november talked about a new upcoming program to be started this past January.
New York City schools started a campaign to help sell their schools to poor kids who view school as a burden. They are looking to rebrand academics. Starting this past January they planned to hand out 15,000 cell phones to middle school kids from high poverty areas. Students would recieve minutes on these phones for doing well in school. They would also get friendly reminders from entertainers and sport celebrities to do well in school. They can download interviews with professionals in different fields like science and accounting. Teachers are also able to contact students with these phones to remind them about an upcoming test or homework assignment.
The Los Angeles Unified School Discrtict started a similar campaign this past summer. They revamped their website to help drop outs get back on track. Their goal is to lower dropout rates from 25% to 20% by the end of the 2007-2008 school year. They also created commericals informing students how much more money you recieve with a high school diploma ($175 a week) and created Youtube and Myspace pages with information.
I could not find any articles with an update on this campaign and how it is going. But I think this program is an excellent idea. It is using the skills of marketers for a good purpose. Getting these students excited about school at a younger age can completely change their future!
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4 posts - 20 points
be sure to point out that the one blog post is about something in the UK (the one from the Scotsman) - different outlook over htere on media regulation
and then you can talk about differences between countries
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