Toys created for Word World are built of letters
held together by magnets.
Chicago’s WTTW and the entertainment company Word World LLC are the surprise recipients of $7.4 million in federal Ready to Learn aid for each of the next five years, receiving nearly a third of the Department of Education funding intended to help children learn to read.
The rest went to CPB and PBS, which collaborated with four major children’s TV producers on a proposal that received $11.8 million a year for production of RTL content and $4 million for outreach. Congress has funded the first of the five years, but the rest of the grants are contingent on appropriations, with next year’s in limbo for the moment.
The grants keep RTL funding within public TV for the next five years, though for the first time CPB and PBS will not manage all of the money. WTTW will administerthe grant supporting Word World, a new children’s TV property that promotes word-building activities for young children, and three other content projects.
“I’d always like all the money — who doesn’t? — but this is a great outcome,” said Peggy O’Brien, CPB’s v.p. of education. “It’s a great chunk of money, it’s a chance to really focus on reading, and that’s a really, really important thing for public broadcasting to be focused on.”
Word World is “clearly a public TV property, and we’re clearly pleased that Ready to Learn has been renewed for public TV, albeit in two grants,” said Dan Schmidt, WTTW president. “I can only imagine that we were successful because we made a big point in our proposal that this involved participants from the public and private sector who have a common approach to furthering the objectives of the Department of Education.”
Word World creator Don Moody, a graphic designer from New York City with experience in TV, retailing and advertising, has developed books, games and plush toys to support the TV series, planned to debut in January 2007.
The WTTW-managed project includes three additional properties to be developed with RTL funds. One is aimed at kids slightly younger than Word World’s target audience and one is for older kids, Moody said. The third goes “well beyond TV” to older kids who play handheld video games, he said.
CPB and PBS, partners in establishing and managing Ready to Learn since the early 1990s, changed their approach this year to meet new educational objectives that focus RTL on reading skills, particularly for kids in low-income families.
CPB and PBS’s Literacy 360 strategy proposes literacy education series from Sesame Workshop, WGBH in Boston, Scholastic and Out of the Blue, the creators of Nickelodeon’s Blues Clues series, according to a summary of the proposal. In addition, the producers of Sesame Street and Between the Lions will develop a new preschool curriculum using content from the shows.
The CPB/PBS outreach plan includes a national public awareness campaign targeted to low-income families, as well as social marketing techniques aimed at parents and caregivers in low-income communities in five markets. The initiative will expand to 17 markets over five years, O’Brien says.
Since CPB and PBS will receive a little more than half of the $20 million they requested for programming, the partners will have to reconsider the budget and timelines laid out in their proposal, according to O’Brien and Charlotte Brantley, PBS’s RTL senior director. Comments from panelists who reviewed the RTL proposals will provide some guidance in how to revise the pubTV plan, according to O’Brien. Since the proposal integrates curricula from all four series to teach specific reading skills to children ages 2 to 8, it’s unlikely that grant administrators would eliminate one or more of the proposed programs, she said.
Funding cuts will force many stations to scale back their preschool education activities. Grants backing local station outreach, a key component of Ready to Learn since its inception 10 years ago, will end in September. RTL grants to stations ranged from $25,000 to $80,000 annually, according to Brantley.
CPB said in June it will ease stations’ shock by spending $3 million in 2006 on transitional grants to as many as 100 stations. About 120 stations requested the three-year Ready to Lead in Literacy grants, which will not exceed $35,000 in the first year and must be matched with station funds. Grant amounts will decrease in $10,000 increments during the program’s final two years.
CPB expects to announce grantees in early September, O’Brien said. The initiative supports stations’ efforts to expand local RTL activities and cultivate new funding sources within their communities.
Under new criteria for RTL funding, the Department of Education expects to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of all content and activities.
Collectible toys ready to go
CPB, PBS and WTTW issued a joint news release announcing the grants Aug. 17, but the Chicago station’s application for the grant was a surprise to O’Brien and others who worked on the CPB/PBS proposal.
WTTW, which has been trying to develop signature children’s properties for several years, decided to submit its proposal independently of CPB and PBS. “This was a strategic area that we were seeking to enter,” Schmidt said, “and it was not as simple a proposition for us to pick up the phone and naturally be included in a PBS/CPB proposal.”
“We decided we would have a better opportunity if we presented a different proposal, a fresh perspective, and we brought something really exciting and innovative and totally new,” he said.
Moody, who has worked as a clothing designer, retailer and advertising exec, began developing Word World six years ago. The Department of Education’s solicitation for new literacy-focused RTL programs lined up with his goal to create fun learning products, he said.
His toys include creatures whose stuffed cloth bodies are made up of letters — B-U-G, D-O-G, F-R-O-G and P-I-G — joined by magnets. Children can pull them apart and put them back together. The television show will encourage audience participation as similar animated animals build simple words and help advance the plot. The curriculum targets preschoolers who don’t yet understand what letters are or how they make words.
Using storybooks based on two episodes of Word World, research consultant Jennifer Shulman tested the concept and storylines with 70 children aged 3 to 6 in daycare centers and schools, according to a summary of the research. The study found “definite yet moderate learning across both stories.” Children participated in the word-building elements, understood the plot lines and chanted along with the characters. The stories appealed to kids regardless of race, gender or family income level, researchers reported.
In addition to addressing this specific area of emergent literacy, the Word World proposal was distinguished by the “unbelievably deep and broad product line” that Moody developed for the property, Schmidt said. “Unlike projects that emerge as a TV show and the ancillary material is derived from that, this started from the other side. It’s already got a rich and fully developed line of toys and games with solid educational values, and they’re a powerful platform in and of themselves.”
Although federal dollars will help bring Word World to television, Schmidtanticipates that ancillary revenues, of which WTTW receives an undisclosed share, will eventually sustain the program.
Developing a licensing program after a children’s TV show becomes successful would be a “disservice to children and their parents,” Moody said. “If you’re going to make an educational children’s property, you ought to be making the products from the beginning” to enhance the educational values of the TV show, he said. “If you don’t build that in early and you try to fill it in later, you have a hackneyed show.”
When the Department of Education first outlined its plans to restructure Ready to Learn late last year, public TV leaders feared that the Bush administration wanted to award grants to nonprofits not associated with public TV. APTS lobbyists met with Department of Education officials to advocate limiting eligibility to “public telecommunications entities” as specified in the law authorizing Ready to Learn. The department’s request for RTL grant proposals, issued in March, used similar language to that requested by APTS.
Early this year a controversy over one program partially funded by RTL — an episode of Postcards from Buster featuring kids with lesbian mothers — embroiled PBS and public TV stations in a dispute over the appropriateness of depicting same-sex parents in a children’s program backed with federal money.
In June, the House of Representatives seemed to weigh in on the controversy when it eliminated funding for RTL, among other pubcasting programs. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to restore $25 million to RTL in July, but its future is unlikely to be resolved until the House and Senate reconcile spending plans this fall.
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posted Aug. 31, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee
