You might want to reconsider that donation to the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Says who?
Look, it's a consensual relationship between backers and people looking for crowdfunding. Obviously outright fraud is wrong, but the article isn't alleging that this is anywhere close to that -- everyone agrees that they're asking for money for what they say they want money for. (And corporations with profit motives and outside investors are, oddly enough, a hedge against the biggest problem with crowdfunding -- the risk that the product won't be delivered upon. "[C]harities, start-ups, independent artists, small-business owners" are more likely to fail to deliver than an otherwise successful business that turns to crowdfunding to support a project.)
Well, I do, for one. I watched the video and read the kickstarter page, and came close to donating. But the more I learned, the more I thought: "wait. this is trying to leverage my childhood nostalgia for a good public television show into a donation to what amounts to an internet startup with a paid product." And then, once I'd re-framed the project in that light I started comparing it to other worthy causes, and it didn't stack up.
The thing is, it took me a lot of thought to get to that point, and I'm pretty sure that most people just punched the money button because Levar Burton and "OMG cute childhood memories!" I'll even wager that a fair number contributed because reading and/or attention span isn't a strong suit (irony!), and they thought the thing was to bring the show back to PBS since there were lots of reading rainbow logos everywhere.
A "consensual relationship" it may be, but the old adage about a sucker being born every minute was also rooted in consensual relationships. It's why we have (had?) those pesky securities laws that prevented direct consumer solicitation of investment in private companies.
But aside from the article's shortcomings, I do agree with their sentiment. You typically see Kickstarter pages explain what they need the money for in some level of detail -- who would want to give strangers money otherwise?
The idea of promoting literature to children is great, but that's just a mission statement. The entire pitch is frustratingly unspecific about what exactly they're making with their million dollars. I can take some pretty good guesses, but why should backers need to guess at that?
But when the history of this day and age is written, we're going to look back at Kickstarter as a candle in the darkness -- right now it's one of the very few ways in which "new media" is grappling seriously with the idea of figuring out how to get consumers pay content producers for content they want, rather than requiring content producers to figure out how to turn their creative endeavor into a convenient medium for advertising. The way some people want to throw it under the bus just because people are actually using it to make money rather than keeping it "pure" for the starving artist annoys me. I want people to make money off Kickstarter. I want more and more content to be made because it's what consumers want, not because it's how advertisers can reach consumers.
The author says that crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster start-ups and small-business owners. The next sentence says that it's not supposed to be used by people with profit motives and private investors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't startups and small businesses usually have investors and want profit?
So the crux of the argument is that Reading Rainbow is no longer a non-profit. I really don't care about that.
This, of course, assumes perfect knowledge and efficiency. I wonder if the author of this piece would make the same sloppy argument against, say, Tell Me More, which, NPR announced this month, will be cut (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314256024/npr...). Or consider Firefly, the arch-example of clueless program cutting (https://www.blastr.com/2013-5-3/netflix-exec-explains-why-th...).
I'm not saying this program was good or should be brought back (I never watched the original and don't know anything about it) but doing a hack piece on a KS campaign with such scant reasoning is not cool.
Seriously though, cancelling the show in 2009 was probably just a mistake or it could have been anyway.
The flip-side of that statistic may well be "close to half of households with children below the poverty line have high-speed Internet". If that's the case today, the trendline is probably going to continue in the direction of more people getting access to high-speed Internet access.
So look at the timeline of a project like this (setting aside whether it's a good project or not, which is besides my point) and think 5 years out; think of the number of households we're already talking about with the current statistic, and how many households it'll be in the future.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/29/how-pew-rese...
To be fair this may not have much effect on their results now, as they say only 10% of their respondents had a smartphone but no home internet; even so, for many people cell phones give the best value and as wireless networks improve and get cheaper I bet more people drop expensive cable operators in favor of wireless--or, alternatively, people who just never saw the need for wired home internet will say "oh, this Facebook thing is neat, I can keep in touch with family and do it right here on my phone."
But my understanding is the new Reading Rainbow will be a website, meaning it will work fine on phones if it follows modern web standards.
My kids and I loved Reading Rainbow so I think whatever shape it comes back as is going to be a plus. If it's only a vehicle for LeVar advocating reading then that's good enough for me.
> he study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Depends what you call literacy. The US has good rates of literacy (over 95%) but as can be seen from the study quoted in WP that doesn't seem to mean much if between 1/5 and 1/4 of the population can't use printed material to extract information.
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said, in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log
That lead me to think that Washington Post has actually some other interests they are not mentioning here, in order to write this article against Reading Rainbow.
> Unfortunately, it’s unclear how the new, digital Reading Rainbow will address that disparity — if it chooses to at all.
Maybe it will address that disparity by recognizing that there is a disparity: those are two different things that both need to be addressed, and it was ridiculous to focus on one while completely abandoning the other in the first place (to be fair, PBS funding somewhat forced the issue).
This is Reading Rainbow continuing to go after "fostering a love of books" and no, not teaching the basics of reading. Why is that an issue?
edit: it also isn't going to be for the desktop, but for the web, something still much more ubiquitous than tablets, especially in low-income areas. Explicitly supporting and testing on the mobile web would be a great goal for them, though, if they don't already plan to do so.
So I have some concern there... But in general, a project betting against devices in the future---even in the hands of at-risk demographics---being more powerful is a project that is targeting wrong. So the concern may be overblown.
I remember learning to read. I taught myself (mostly) because I wanted to read books. I went to a tiny rural school with 3 grades in each room. After school it was an hour or so before my dad could come get me. I sat and looked at books. When I didn't know a word, a very patient older lady, the teacher, would tell me what it was while she sat and graded papers (probably cursing my dad to herself). I learned to read in kindergarten, a full year before the rest of the class (admittedly this wasn't a high achieving school and was nearly 40 years ago).
The point is... To teach kids how to read is just like teaching anything else. Get them interested in it. Or, we can keep trying to club them over the head with reading. Even though that approach doesn't seem to be working.
It looks like the writer of this article may be one of those disadvantaged illiterates. Or at least a technoilliterate. The kickstarter is about getting Reading Rainbow on the web, and thus everywhere; desktop, tablet, phones. I see no mention of any desktop-specific app, or indeed any app except the pre-existing iPad one.
WP writes say "neither WNED nor PBS wanted to pony up because both believed that the show was no longer the best way to teach kids reading skills. "
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log
That the kickstarter was so successful among the kids of yesterday speaks to its' long lasting influence and positive impact. Even if it's just nostalgia and a catchy themesong driving the money, they will certainly do some good.