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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
by pinko 1y ago
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.
- karaterobot 1y agoThey 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.