I learned to read using phonics, and I’m glad that schools across the nation are finally settling on this method (why this is even up for debate nearly 70 years after the publication of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” is beyond me!)
That said, I will be interested in seeing the reading results once phonics has been in place 10 years. Reading is still hard for a lot of students. English is a difficult language to learn to read to begin with, and add to that any learning disability or stressful home situation, and it becomes harder still. My prediction is that there will be modest improvements in low-performing districts, but that switching to a phonics curriculum will not prove to be any sort of magic bullet.
I now I’m a little late the party, but I love this comment! My younger child also has Dyslexia. I cannot tell you how painful it is when I hear that if parents read to their children, they will become readers. Nope! When it is slow and painstaking (after remediation that generally takes place after school because the schools do a bad job), you don’t generally become someone who enjoys reading. Luckily, my wonderful Dyslexic child did learn grit. That has helped her immensely. She is now in college and doing so well.
I’m just now getting over the bitterness of the public schools that kept telling me she as fine. I knew in kindergarten there was a problem because she could never rhyme. She’s smart, though, so they had plausible deniability and she was great at faking it. They gaslighted me until the end of 3rd grade when I finally took measures into my own hands and paid for an evaluation out of pocket. Even after she was diagnosed and got an IEP, the remediation was ineffective and not science based. I’m sad for my child, who missed the joy of reading (although she has always loved to be read to) and had to catch up on so much that the other kids picked up by being able to read well years earlier than she could.
Our reading education system is broken and our special ed system is even worse. We were lucky we could afford to remediate privately once we figured out that FAPE was a joke. My heart breaks for kids who do not have that advantage.