Yes, I’m sorry to say this is the almost inescapable conclusion.
Many people hate to use the word “conspiracy.” But the existence of 50,000,000 functional illiterates suggests that our Education Establishment is hugely incompetent OR hugely subversive.
As some wit has suggested: “Nobody’s that incompetent.”
Ken Goodman, the whole-word guru, trained hundreds of teachers at the University of Arizona. I had the extraordinary experience of meeting one who got his M.A. there under Goodman. We met over dinner at a mutual friend’s house, and after a few drinks, he boasted about the Goodman method. After a little prodding he admitted that their technique was not meant to teach all kids to read in first grade. The purpose, he claimed, was to weed out those children who could not learn under the whole word method so they could be routed to the Title I classes in remedial reading.
Why? Apparently this was some kind of half-baked plan to increase the army of remedial reading teachers needed by each school district.