Trying to get phonics in the schools? If you succeed, I guarantee the program will be undermined within two years. Another stealth version of the completely discredited "see-say" method will be quietly introduced. "See-say" has never worked, will never work, and can never work. So why do schools refuse to teach?
1. The teachers are trained at teacher colleges that are very similar throughout the country. Unlike any other profession, teachers are indoctrinated to believe the same things nation wide. There are "rebels", but a large majority of teachers mouth the same pathetic platitudes across the nation. Teachers are not taught how to teach. They are taught how to make the "learning experience" meaningful and uplifting to the student. They are taught how to help students "feel good". They are taught how to indoctrinate their students into liberalism. It's all crap. Deeply engrained crap. The average teacher is delusional about the teaching profession. (I know there are exceptions.)
Read the whole sorry story in Richard Mitchell's "The Graves of Academe", a book that will convince you to just give up on "reforming" the schools -- the complete version is on the web.
2. The administrators are people who hate to teach. But they share the same delusions about "teaching" as the teachers since they also were indoctrinated at the teacher colleges.
3. School district officials have infinite resources to use against would-be reformers and they have no scrupples against lying about what goes on in a classroom. They have an infinite supply of promises they have no intention of keeping.
There is no such thing as public school reform. Parents who want educated children need to figure out how to homeschool or to send their kids to private school. Period.
Public schools: opt out is the only option.