Well, phonics is just the tip of the iceberg, Ron. I've been around a lot of schools and school systems over the last 20+ years as a teacher, and I can say that overall, schools in the U.S. are quickly deteriorating. As I was leaving Oklahoma seven years ago, schools in the Oklahoma City area were patting themselves on the back for converting over to some kind of a system -- I can't remember their terminology, for I was only introduced to it and discovered that it sucked terribly -- where students have only four courses at a time, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, about 1.5 hours each for the first semester and then four new courses, same way, second semester (at least I think that was the way it worked). They claimed longer class sessions, and more courses of study during a student's educational life, but when you actually put the pencil to the math, they actually spend less time overall per subject and couldn't possibly cover what they used to in the old system. The result was that you were going to have students that knew a little about a lot but not a lot about anything in particular.
Dean