(I promise, this is music-related. Bear with.)

Reading Rainbow

Sad face. Today is the last day that the children’s show Reading Rainbow will air on PBS stations. The show aired for 26 years and earned 24 Emmys. It premiered in 1983, stopped production in 2006 when funding ran out, and today the PBS contract expires, so they can no longer feed it to local affiliate stations.

I’m sad about this. This show was just as much a part of my childhood as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers (which, by the way, are the only two childrens shows with a longer run than Reading Rainbow).

But there’s more to it than just being sad. I could get really angry about this. Part of the reason the show ran out of money is “a shift in [the government's] philosophy of educational television programming” during the Bush administration. I’ll paste part of an article from washingtonpost.com, which mostly quotes NPR.

A Friday morning NPR report noted the show’s conclusion and aired comments by John Grant, director of content at the show’s home station, WNED in Buffalo. Producers were unable to secure the several hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights, Grant said.

Why? According to NPR:

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 [the Public Broadcasting Service], [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] 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.”

In the report, a PBS official acknowledged the shift in reading philosophy from “how do we get kids interested?” to a focus on phonics.

That line – teaching kids why to read – is so important. It was to me, for sure.

For a jog down memory lane, check out the old school theme song:

And now, check out this fun rework courtesy of 8-Bit Betty:

8bit bEtty – Reading Rainbow.mp3

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thank you, LeVar Burton. The show will be missed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.