The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

Also the kids vary a lot in what they're interested in and what they exhibit a natural aptitude for. You seem to suppose that all the world's four year olds want to learn to read and are naturally good at that, but, the evidence strongly disagrees. If you only needed, say, 10% of your population as literate scribes then relying on this approach would work, but our society is predicated on an overwhelming majority of literate adults.

It's way worse than that. The "1 in 4" amount is for one particular way of doing it.

Here's an older article about the topic in general: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonic...

> The debate — often called the “reading wars” — is generally framed as a battle between two distinct views. On one side are those who advocate for an intensive emphasis on phonics: understanding the relationships between sounds and letters, with daily lessons that build on each other in a systematic order. On the other side are proponents of approaches that put a stronger emphasis on understanding meaning, with some sporadic phonics mixed in. Balanced literacy is one such example.

> [..]

> In a 2019 survey of 674 early-elementary and special education teachers from around the United States, 72 percent said their schools use a balanced literacy approach, according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonprofit organization in Bethesda, Md. The implementation of balanced literacy, however, varies widely, especially in how much phonics is included, the survey found. That variation is probably preventing lots of kids from learning to read as well as they could, decades of research suggests.

Balanced literacy is one way of deemphasizing phonics, and was at 72% in 2019. The "1 in 4" amount is one particular curriculum for doing balanced literacy.

We do in fact. Parents (what you term "random people off the street") are expected to take an active role in educating their children. Ask public school teachers in America what frustrates them the most and the two top answers will be their administrators and parents who aren't involved in the education of their children. Parents like the article author who think there is a "unspoken contract" that schools will handle all education are the bane of teachers. Teachers hate people like this. I have several school teachers in my family and they all rant nonstop about parents like this.

If a parent tries and fails to teach their child how to read before the first grade, that's fine. They can let the teachers know that and the teachers can start giving that child special attention right away. But a parent who doesn't even try because they think the education of their child is the sole responsibility of the school are the kind of parents that teachers hate. It's neglect, not legally actionable neglect but certainly neglect nevertheless.

By the time a child gets to the first grade they are already 6 or 7 years old and the window for easy reading acquisition is almost closed. The article author found this out too late and now her daughter still struggles to read. Incidentally...

> When it became clear that my daughter was also among the roughly half of all kids who will not read fluidly without explicit phonics instruction, I left my job, in part to help. [...] My daughter’s progress has been slower, perhaps because her tutoring took place online.

She left her job to help her daughter learn to read, yet her daughter is being tutored ineffectually on the internet. Why isn't she tutoring her daughter in person, if she left work to help? Because...

> I left my job, in part to help. I also embarked on a doomed crusade to persuade our school’s administration that—

Her idea of "leave work to help" apparently means leave work so she has more time to write angry emails at the school. The teachers must absolutely hate her.

Yeah I get it, not everybody knows how to teach kids to read, but she took off work for this so she should have the time to figure it out. She should go to a public library and tell a librarian that she wants to use the phonics method to teach her child how to read. Librarians can direct her to appropriate books and probably give her a ton of supporting material as well. But she's not going to do this because she's locked into the mentality that teaching her kid to read isn't a job for her. She wants schools or internet tutors to do it for her, and when that doesn't work she takes to writing articles complaining about the situation instead of doing it herself. Meanwhile the days tick away and her daughter becomes less and less likely to ever read well.