If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. That's what some large school districts have decided in the struggle with media saturation for students' attention. Last month, New York City distributed cell phones to 2,500 students as the first salvo of a $2 million campaign to engage students more in school. Some planned uses for the phones sound useful (teachers will be able to text students on important upcoming assignments, tests, etc.), others a bit tired (hiring celebrity spokespeople to record downloadable messages encouraging students to do well in class).

But can school really be marketed as a "must-have" product to disinterested teenagers and would-be dropouts, as some advertising gurus would have us believe? Los Angeles Unified School District seems to think so, recently spending millions on Web 2.0 applications to improve its graduation rates. Last fall, the district launched a Web site devoted to re-enrollment and assembled a team of mentor students to communicate with their peers via a MySpace page and You Tube videos telling their stories and encouraging their friends to re-enroll.

Naturally, skepticism abounds from those who believe that utilizing tools such as cell phones, viral marketing schemes, etc. amounts to little more than a "kitchen sink" strategy to attack an enormously complicated problem. We'll soon see how it plays out--although New York's campaign to "rebrand" school is still in its infancy, LAUSD hopes to bring 5 percent of the current 17,000 current dropouts back into school by the end of this school year.

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