The Limits of Reading Rainbow

On May 28th, the people behind Reading Rainbow launched a Kickstarter campaign to “Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.” They gave themselves thirty-five days to raise a million dollars; that took less than twelve hours, so they raised their fundraising goal to five million dollars. Hours before the campaign closed, with the help of more than a hundred thousand backers and a smorgasbord of rewards for contributors, they made that goal, too. Reading Rainbow’s campaign hits the Internet’s sweet spot: millennial nostalgia; a kitschy, easily parodied theme song; an Upworthy-worthy goal of putting books in every child’s hands nationwide.

“Reading Rainbow,” hosted by the actor LeVar Burton, began airing on PBS in 1983. It was beloved in schools: in 1997, teachers rated “Reading Rainbow” as the best public-television program they’d used for educational purposes, according to a Corporation for Public Broadcasting study. But, in the early aughts, the funding that supported the show began to disintegrate, Donald Boswell, the president of WNED Buffalo, “Reading Rainbow”’s home station, told me. Some federal money for literacy programs was diverted to math and science education. Funding that did remain available for language arts went to programs emphasizing basic skills like phonics and spelling rather than the love and mastery of reading. “Reading Rainbow” was cancelled in 2006. Reruns stayed on the air until 2009, when PBS pulled the show from its lineup.

Burton had known that “Reading Rainbow” was beloved, but he didn’t realize what a cult classic it was until it was gone. In 2009, Burton and Mark Wolfe, who had been a producer on the show, were listening to an NPR program covering the end of “Reading Rainbow,” and audience members started calling in to express their dismay. “People were saying, I’m twenty-seven, I have my own kids, I naturally presumed it would be available, I’m so sad,” Wolfe told me. “LeVar and I looked at each other—wow.” In 2011, Wolfe and Burton licensed the Reading Rainbow brand from WNED Buffalo and formed a business called RRKidz, with Wolfe as its C.E.O., to bring the program back to life in another form. In 2012, RRKidz announced that it had built a Reading Rainbow tablet app. Within thirty-six hours of its release, it became the most downloaded educational app on the iTunes store; it’s remained one of the most popular reading apps, with more than fifteen million books and videos accessed since it launched.

The Reading Rainbow of today is different than the one I remember from childhood. In the television version, a soothing voice read books to viewers as illustrations drifted across the screen like fish in an aquarium. LeVar and the gang would go on trips related to the featured books: they’d ride hot air balloons, bury time capsules, and learn sign language from Koko the gorilla. The television series also featured real-life kids trumpeting their favorite books. The Reading Rainbow tablet app is busier. It includes e-books, videos, and games, organized into sections with titles like “Action Adventures & Magical Tales” or “Animal Kingdom.” A lot of the old elements remain—field trips, books read out loud—but while the TV show was all about using the screen to get kids away from the screen, the Reading Rainbow app is about doing everything, including reading, on the screen.

The Kickstarter campaign, which includes a lot of rhetoric about bringing Reading Rainbow back, is really about improving that existing app. Reading Rainbow executives want to add more books, videos, and other material. Now that they’ve reached their funding goal, they plan to make it available not only on tablets but on computers, smart phones, Xboxes, and connected televisions. And they’re going to provide the app for free to thousands of schools with low-income students. (For others, it costs nine dollars and ninety-nine cents per month.) The campaign has been praised from nearly every corner of the Internet, but there has also been backlash. Caitlin Dewey, at the Washington Post, cast doubt on the campaign’s “grandiose charity rhetoric.” She wrote that “crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster charities, start-ups, independent artists, small-business owners and other projects that actually need the financial support of the masses to succeed. It’s not supposed to be co-opted by companies with profit motives and private investors of their own … which, despite Burton’s charisma, is exactly what the Rainbow reboot is.” Wolfe countered that for-profit companies can have altruistic motives. “It takes money to create things,” he said. “And that’s perfectly fine.”

Then there’s another question: Will the app actually do more to improve children’s mastery of reading than any of the hundreds of other reading apps out there? According to a report from the National Assessment for Education Progress, in 2011, little more than a third of fourth graders were proficient at reading at their grade level. The Kickstarter campaign’s rhetoric makes it sound like by donating to Reading Rainbow, you can help our nation’s kids become better readers: “We can make sure that millions of kids learn to love reading, but we can’t do it without you.” But teaching reading isn’t that simple, especially when technology is involved.

Reading apps are tough to evaluate, as a concept, partly because every app looks different and the technology is constantly changing. In 2012, Robert Slavin and Alan Cheung, of Johns Hopkins University, reviewed eighty-four studies and found that the least helpful programs were computer-managed learning tools—programs that include quizzes and assessment tools but don’t have actual books built in. The most helpful technology integrated books directly into apps, like Reading Rainbow does (though Reading Rainbow itself, which came out after the study did, isn’t included). Overall, though, the usefulness of these apps wasn’t statistically significant.

Playing with an app—even if the app is helpful—may never be enough. Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank, contrasted reading with math. “Math is a hierarchical, school-based subject,” he said. It’s easy to measure a kid’s understanding of basic math concepts through games: solve an equation to get the frog to leap to the lily pad, and congratulations, you can add! But literacy requires not just a set of discrete skills—spelling, grammar—but also a kind of comprehension that is hard to measure with an app.

The people behind Reading Rainbow admit their project isn’t perfect. They point out, however, that quantifying kids’ reading skills wasn’t their goal in the first place. “It was never our mission to teach kids how to read,” Wolfe said. “Our mission is to help kids get comfortable with reading. We want to make reading a successful experience for them.” They want to keep Reading Rainbow on whatever technology is relevant for contemporary kids. “If kids of the future are reading on retinal implants, Reading Rainbow will be there,” Wolfe told me. That is, they want every iteration of Reading Rainbow—whether it’s a television show, an app, or Reading Retinal Rainbow—simply to get kids to enjoy reading.

There’s a good deal of value in that. Stephen Krashen, an education researcher, has shown that when kids choose what they get to read and when, their vocabulary and language skills tend to improve, as does their overall knowledge and ability to think for themselves. The Reading Rainbow app seems particularly well-suited for that kind of reading experience. The fact that the app facilitates an entirely onscreen reading experience might not be a bad thing, either. A recent survey of families in the United Kingdom showed that kids were more likely to enjoy reading if, instead of using only books, they used both books and touch screens. And amid our cultural obsession with using technology to track and measure our performance, there’s something nice about an app that, instead of rating and ranking kids, mostly just lets them read. Wolfe told me that his team had just filmed a field trip involving a dog who helps kids read: they can read aloud to Tazo without anyone criticizing or correcting them. “The dog is not judgmental,” Wolfe said. “It’s safe and warm and fuzzy.”

Illustration by Boyoun Kim.