Also throwing money at problems doesn't necessarily solve them. Sometimes problems get worse when you throw more money at them. No matter how much money you throw at education, if you don't use Phonics to teach them, kids won't be able to read. Guess what we use?
Ok, this is mostly irrelevant - education is not one of those problems that money can’t at least massively improve. And lack of direct phonics instruction will leave behind some kids. And if you use phonics without the rest of learning to read, some of them still won’t manage it. One of the reasons that teaching American kids how to read varies is that somewhere between 30 and 60% of kids will figure it out if you just read to them enough. The others have a wide variety of gaps, ranging from hearing or sight difficulties to short term memory issues to not speaking English. Phonics helps a subset of them, but is not enough by itself - and I don’t know who “we” is, but most American schools do and have always taught phonics. The debate is really over the length of time and level of focus it gets, and whether to make 100% of kids sit through it when maybe half of them don’t need it. I’m sure there are teachers out there who just don’t teach phonics but I haven’t seen them.
We haven't used Phonics in US schools since the 1980s in most cases. So I somehow doubt you have kids or have interacted with a US public school in decades.
This is so wildly incorrect that I question your understanding of the word Phonics. Not only do I have kids in school now, I am familiar with the curriculums recently used by multiple school districts (and the alternatives they considered), and research conducted over the last five decades on literacy teaching around the US.
