Philadelphia’s sports venues wear their corporate names proudly. But the same commercialization logic that put Lincoln Financial on an NFL stadium has quietly crept into places far more consequential — the hallways and gymnasiums of public schools.
Lincoln Financial Group purchased the naming rights to the Philadelphia Eagles’ stadium. Citizens Bank branded the Phillies’ ballpark. The 76ers and Flyers now play at what was once the Wells Fargo Center, rebranded as the Xfinity Mobile Arena. These are private entertainment venues, and the commercial logic there is at least straightforward: teams need revenue, corporations want visibility, and adults choose whether to attend.
What happens when that same logic crosses the Delaware River into a public elementary school is a different matter entirely. In Brooklawn, New Jersey, the children of Alice Costello Elementary School play dodgeball in the ShopRite of Brooklawn Gymnasium — a name the district adopted back in 2001 after selling naming rights to the regional grocery chain. Brooklawn is widely credited as one of the first public school districts in the country to commodify its physical spaces this way. It was not, by a long stretch, the last.
The arrangement raises a question that deserves a direct answer: what does it mean when a cash-strapped public school district — underfunded by design, the product of decades of inequitable state and federal education policy — turns to a supermarket chain to keep its gymnasium lights on? It means the system is failing. Not the district, not the principal, not even the ShopRite — the system. Public schools should not need to auction off their walls to provide basic facilities to children.
Defenders of these deals argue they generate revenue without raising taxes, a framing that sounds pragmatic but conceals a deeper capitulation. Every dollar a corporation spends branding a school gymnasium is a dollar that buys something real: access to children during the years their brand loyalties, consumer habits, and sense of what is normal are being formed. That is not a neutral transaction. It is a subsidy extracted from the public in the form of normalized corporate presence in spaces that are supposed to be insulated from market logic precisely because children cannot opt out.
Wealthier districts, predictably, rarely need to make these deals. The naming-rights market in public education tracks the same fault lines as every other education inequality story: the districts with the least resources face the greatest pressure to commercialize, and the children with the fewest alternatives absorb the most corporate messaging. That is not an accident. It is the compounding effect of chronic underfunding, and it deserves to be named as such.
The Brooklawn gymnasium deal is now more than two decades old. In that time, the practice has spread, normalized by repetition and fiscal desperation. The real question is not whether a school district should be blamed for taking a lifeline when one is offered. The real question is why the lifeline is a grocery store’s logo instead of adequate public funding — and who benefits from keeping that distinction blurry.