By Adrienne Raphel | Originally Published at The New Yorker. July 2, 2014
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 empathyeducates – The Limits of Reading Rainbow: