Editorial: Don’t pull program over pizza if it works

In an age of declining public education and lowered interest in reading among children, protesting the United State’s No. 1 reading-advocacy program doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Unless, apparently, that reading-advocacy program also advocates eating at Pizza Hut.

Child-development experts are crying foul about the Book It program, a reading-incentive program in place at over 50,000 elementary schools that reaches 22 million children.

Yet these experts aren’t decrying the program’s effectiveness. Instead, they’re questioning its reward system.

In Book It, teachers at participating schools set a goal each month for the amount of books students should read.

If students meet this goal, they’re presented with a gift certificate to Pizza Hut. Families often accompany their children to the restaurant, enhancing profitability for the chain.

Rewarding children with pizza, opponents say, negatively encourages children to gorge on pizza and also turns teachers into corporate spokespeople.

“In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience … and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children,” said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and cofounder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, in an interview with CNN.

While it’s difficult to argue that junk-food consumption is healthy for growing children and while it is a shame that children have to be coerced into reading, trying to stop this program makes even less sense.

Scaling back or stopping Book It, which has been in place since 1985, would not stop children from eating junk food. Using Book It gift certificates, after all, is not the only time children and their families eat at Pizza Hut or get pizza delivered.

It is also up to the parents to make sure they regulate their children’s junk food consumption, and opponents are misdirecting their energy if they think the fight for children’s nutrition means getting rid of this program.

It’s foolish to think that stopping one program would discourage children from eating junk food ““ especially when the program is one that is clearly getting students to do something they should be doing more often.

The results speak for themselves: according to CNN, at Strafford Elementary School in Missouri, 500 students read around 30,000 books a year through the program.

The fact is, children live in an environment where they have less of an incentive to read than ever before.

With distractions such as television, video games and the Internet, getting children to read for fun on their own time has never been so difficult. Essentially the only way to get a vast majority of children to want to read is through incentive-based programs like this one.

Book It isn’t the only source of an unhealthy diet ““ at best, ending the program will reduce children’s pizza consumption by only one day per month.

Moreover, if children are given a reward and it inspires them to read as many books as possible, there also exists the chance that children may find they actually enjoy reading.

If it takes rewarding children to get them to read, taking away rewards would only add to ““ not solve ““ the problem.