My 6 year old is in week 7 of first grade and seems to read remarkably well.
You get what you put into it.
Agreed.
Anyone who wishes to be literate will be forced to eventually transition over to phonetic reading of necessity. That is a forgone conclusion. Even Chinese, the most notable of ideographic languages is taught using Pinyin (Chinese phonics using the latin alphabet).
The idea of learning to read the entire english language as ideographs, like traditional Chinese, was never the intention of the "sight word" method as far as I can tell; it was to get the kids to ACTUALLY READ as soon as possible, which it seems to do well.
My five year old was reading better in preK than I was by the end of first grade using traditional phonics taught in a Catholic School.
Granted, she's never going to be able to read Alan Bloom using "sight words," but she's doing pretty good with "Pinkalicious" right now, and at five years old I'm ecstatic over it.
Now when she comes to me and asks "daddy, what's this word?" I dutifully teach her to "sound it out," because I DO want her to be able to read Bloom some day.
It seems to me if the parent is doing their part the transition should be fairly seamless, but if one thinks it's the job of the school system to make their child a scholar they are in for a grave disappointment.
All in all, I find this controversy to be little more than a contemporary analog to the old "backward masking" nonsense. Opponents where so fixated on proving it was occurring, they never bothered to establish whether the human brain could pick up messages delivered in that form in the first place. nk
I learned how to read in first grade and was reading at the fifth grade level in second and college level in fifth.
No one put anything into it but me.