“Reading Rainbow was cancelled because of George W. Bush” is a sentence I never thought I’d write, but here we are, so let’s get into it. The much-beloved educational show was the third longest running in PBS history, and it’s firmly entrenched in the minds of millenials of a certain age. Then it was gone.
The show featured Star Trek‘s Geordi Laforge without his eyepiece, aka Levar Burton. He would introduce a theme each week and cover topics like prison and 9/11, and every episode had a celebrity reading a story. The show debuted in 1983, and made it 26 years.
At the time of the cancellation, Levar vaguely said something about “the direction” the show was being taken by producers. The truth was two-pronged; it was an expensive show to produce, due to licensing the books and broadcast rights, and no one really wanted to pony up the dough, per this explainer article in Distractify.
The second reason is more political. During his administration, Bush created the No Child Left Behind education initiative. It shifted from teaching kids how to read by example, and put more emphasis on basics of reading like spelling and phonetics, with a a particularly exaggerated emphasis on standardized testing.
In short, the focus of the Bush Administration’s educational attention pivoted from the joy of reading, to metrics and numbers. Since Reading Rainbow’s intended audience was kids who could already read, and it focused on fostering an affinity for books, it lost funding. Here’s how Burton tells it in a 2012 interview:
“PBS took Reading Rainbow off the air in 2009 primarily as a result of No Child Left Behind. That’s a story that a lot of folks don’t get. So, No Child Left Behind is doing exactly that. The mandate is to teach kids how to read, the rudiments of reading, and there was no money in the budget to encourage, to foster a love of reading.”
For those who miss Burton’s silky voice, he does a podcast called Levar Burton reads. Also, just for fun, here’s Jimmy Fallon doing the Reading Rainbow theme as Jim Morrison, which has no business being as good as it is.
