This article lavishes well-deserved praise on the intentions behind Reading Rainbow. I know I loved the show as a kid.
But it seems like childhood reading scores were pretty much flat between 1983 and 2006, when the show was on the air: they only varied by 10-15 points on a 500 point scale[1], and there was no clear upward trend, it just sort of fluctuated. Reading for pleasure has never been lower among kids, either[2]. It doesn't seem to me that the mission of the show was achieved, if the mission was to make children read more books, and understand them more.
Ultimately I think it ended up just being a pleasurable way to have kids get distracted by a friendly, positive TV show. My guess is that if you want to improve reading scores and habits, parents have to do more than just turn the dial to PBS.
It would be more relevant to look at reading scores for children who specifically tuned into Reading Rainbow. I suspect the number of viewers was a small fraction of all children in the US, in which case the show's ability to affect the nationwide reading scores would be low. In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
We'd also have to figure out whether children who already loved reading watched Reading Rainbow, or if children who hated reading started liking it after watching. Since nobody has that data, I'll go with the aggregate.
> In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
I don't think it conclusively proves anything, but I do think it supports a skeptical position. The article doesn't cite anything supporting the notion that Reading Rainbow improved childhood literacy, so I'm wondering if you take the position that it did—and if so, on what basis?
RR was swimming against a current; 83-06 (and even going back to the early 70s) would have been the first generation+ raised by the first generations raised by TV, or with a TV in the house. It was also the first generation with access to the internet during childhood and young adulthood. People waiting for the movie to come out instead of reading the novel, etc. Everything about the technological zeitgeist was selling Americans on the idea that books didn't matter. The question isn't whether RR raised reading scores, but whether it kept them above water. Your graphs can't tell us anything about which is the case, but considering the context shows us which question is actually interesting and which isn't.
You may be right, but we have no idea what the scores would have been had Reading Rainbow not been on (i.e., maybe it held off a decline), so this isn't really meaningful one way or the other.
They didn't start tracking in 1983, the numbers I linked start in 1971. The trend line is pretty much the same from 1971 to 1983 as it is from 1983 to 2006. In any case, a skeptical person would not look at that graph and say that there was a successful effort to improve childhood literacy represented on it.
It's true that we don't know the counterfactual: it's possible literacy would have plummeted precipitously starting in 1984 if Reading Rainbow hadn't been a bulwark. But I don't find that the most likely explanation, personally.
But it seems like childhood reading scores were pretty much flat between 1983 and 2006, when the show was on the air: they only varied by 10-15 points on a 500 point scale[1], and there was no clear upward trend, it just sort of fluctuated. Reading for pleasure has never been lower among kids, either[2]. It doesn't seem to me that the mission of the show was achieved, if the mission was to make children read more books, and understand them more.
Ultimately I think it ended up just being a pleasurable way to have kids get distracted by a friendly, positive TV show. My guess is that if you want to improve reading scores and habits, parents have to do more than just turn the dial to PBS.
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/12/among-man...