The End of the Reading Rainbow
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After my last day of school with students last week, I wanted to just… rest. There is no kind of tired like end-of-the-school-year tired. But my wife turned on Netflix so we could tune in to a 2022 documentary I hadn’t even heard of: Butterfly in the Sky. It was the story of the television show Reading Rainbow.
I was hooked.
The show debuted in 1983 while I was in high school, so it had not been a part of my childhood, but it ran until 2006, so it was a part of my children’s childhood. Born in the mid-1990’s to a cable-television-free home, our kids had a steady diet of books and PBS kids’ shows.
The documentary is terrific. Shots of the those little kids recommending books shift to interviews of those same kids all grown up. We see host Levar Burton standing in front of an erupting volcano, piloting a plane, scuba diving, and showing us around the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, among other things. It talks about how the show created increased sales of children’s books while it was on the air. It is heartwarming and magical.
But I had never known how the show had ended.
Reading Rainbow was funded, in part, by a federal “Ready to Learn” grant. But after the No Child Left Behind act, the grant began to focus on literacy skills and spelling and phonics instruction. Reading Rainbow focused on love of reading and actual engagement with the content of books. As someone in the film says, “Love of reading isn’t measurable.”
And so the show wound up being canceled due to the Reading Wars.
The idea that reading has to be all about phonics and that love of reading and enjoyment of books and stories doesn’t matter is as wrong-headed as saying phonics doesn’t matter. I’m not an expert in Reading with a capital R, but as parents, we managed to raise two readers. Phonics was the how; love of books was the why. We had a toy called the Phonics Bus in our house, and a lot of “ABC” books. Our son knew all his letters, upper and lower case, by the time he was 18 months old. Our daughter had eye problems, but once she had glasses, she wasn’t far behind. So we did the phonics thing before they even reached Kindergarten.
But you know what else we did? We did our own at-home version of Reading Rainbow. From the time they were tiny babies, we read to them. Every. Single. Night.
By the time they were around 5 years old (they were born 11 months apart), we started reading chapter books aloud. They grew to love reading.
A student can be “phonics-ed” until they know every possible sound and diphthong, but if they don’t love reading, they won’t do it.
I start to wonder if the push toward all phonics, all the time (the science of reading) is actually a way to make kids proficient at sounding out words but unable to derive enjoyment or meaning from what they read. The same forces that push for phonics and only phonics are often the same people pushing for widespread book bans.
The push to make reading about a narrowly defined set of “measurable” skills is really a war on the love and enjoyment of reading. And Reading Rainbow was one of the war’s early victims.