Is it really true that 1 in 4 schools stopped teaching kids to associate sounds with letters so they could sound out words? That sounds so insane it beggars belief. If that's true then no wonder people don't trust schools; trust isn't warranted. But the idea is so insane on the face of it that I have trouble believing it.
Secondly, if 1 in 4 schools did this and half of the students in these schools fail at reading because of it, then "and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams." seems a bit dubious. If school's adopted this program independent of school size and half of the students at those schools struggled to read for this reason alone, then I'd expect roughly 1/8th of all students nationally to be negatively effected, not one half.
Third, it would have been nice for this article to go more into the history of the idea. It pretty much lays all the blame on this Lucy Calkins and Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, but also blames this line of thinking for a 1973 SCOTUS decision. That was several years before the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was founded, but the article doesn't go into this history.