Public schools have been teaching "cueing" instead of phonics for a couple of decades, despite research showing that it...makes kids worse readers. This is finally changing. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
Phonics is not about "teaching English" in some fuzzy generic sense, it's specifically aimed towards teaching English written orthography, starting from its phonetics. I.e. teaching fluent speakers of English to read.
I could also see it resulting in more subvocalization, but my assumption is that subvocalization is actually a very important short-term strategy that almost always goes away quickly.
Individual letters don’t have sounds, but trigrams do.
food, good
rough, dough
two, to, too
If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .
It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings
English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.
Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?
Whereas at least 75% of elementary students nationwide are learning cueing, so starting there makes more sense.
San Francisco Unified School District implemented math sequencing changes that failed. District Leadership claimed they worked. Those changes were then cited by the authors of the latest California Math Framework.
Because California is a big state (and with some popular state universities), the California Math Framework will influence curricula and teaching methods far beyond California.
It has had a nationwide impact already. It's not a hypothetical.
Jo Boaler and her organization have done consulting not only in SF and not only in California.
Her impact on K-12 math education is directionally the same as Lucy Calkin's impact on reading instruction.
Can you show me direct evidence that these policies have been adopted nationwide to the broad degree necessary to explain the data as presented in the original post?
You say it's a local thing only. I explain how local things expand. You say it's a hypothetical. I say no these things have expanded already. You say that doesn't fully explain the data.
If you will dismiss any hypothesis that doesn't fully explain the data, you will never receive a satisfying answer.
I have not seen any evidence that this policy, loosely defined, has spread in any considerable way nationally.
I won't comment on those opinions, but what you've written earlier in the paragraph is broadly correct, at least in San Francisco.
However, private schools are not a panacea. Most of them still group kids by age and do not tailor content to each kid's level, or even do single-subject acceleration.