captainsblog | Well THAT sucks (Reply)

About the only significant thing our local PBS station has done in my most recent 15 years here, other than constantly beg for money and build a Taj Mahal of a studio on the waterfront, was to produce one national educational program for children: Reading Rainbow.

As of today, though (with one last broadcast on WNED's extra cable channel that I will try to record for posterity on Monday), not any more:

Even if you can't remember a specific Reading Rainbow episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head:

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it's in a book — Reading Rainbow ...

Remember now?

Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children's show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers.

The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don't know Burton from Reading Rainbow, he's also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots, or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

Each episode of Reading Rainbow had the same basic elements: There was a featured children's book that inspired an adventure with Burton. Then, at the end of every show, kids gave their own book reviews, always prefaced by Burton's trademark line: "But you don't have to take my word for it ..."

"The series resonates with so many people," says John Grant, who is in charge of content at WNED Buffalo, Reading Rainbow's home station.

"I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being," Burton said in a 2003 interview. "It's just such an integral part of the human experience — that connection with the written word."

The show's run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights.

Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.

Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do.

"Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read," Grant says. "You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read."

On the way back from Boston last weekend, one of Connecticut's NPR stations broadcast the first of a three-part Bob Edwards series on educational issues in this country, featuring NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein as the voice of "reform" and NYU professor (and former Clinton education advisor) Diane Ravitch as the conscience tapping that voice on the shoulder. So much of No Child Left Behind wound up focused on test scores, rather than on building a love of learning for its own sake and for the books and theories and processes that are themselves lovable. It's sad that one more effort to focus on the end, and not the means, has now bitten the dust.