Note that phonics instruction would allow the student to read every word by the second grade. But the sight-word method promises that by third grade, the children will know a small subset of English words but still remain largely illiterate. What sort of promise is that?
When my youngest son went into pubic school, he was not learning to “guess read” as he was being “taught.” They taught him to guess what the words were - not sound them out. He was a bad guesser.
The memorization of “sight words” occurs automatically when they learn to read with phonics along with word spelling lists and definitions.
I taught him to read quickly at home school with phonics. I sent him to school knowing all the sounds of the letters and common letter combinations. So he just had to remember what he already knew and blend the sounds for words. We had a great reading program. He was so relieved when he learned to read and loved it. He knew reading was important to us and he thought he was stupid for not learning right. That really irked me. He’s was a smart kid. He did not return to herd school until high school and only did that to play lax. He was ready for college courses by the end of eighth grade. He had tutors who were students at Harvard for math and science.
If I had it to do over again, he would not have returned to public school and gotten an associate’s degree at the Jr. college down the road during high school years, instead. Then off to college. We would have saved money and he had too much free time to goof off in public school! Lax wrecked his knees...but he was good at it.
They are right, if all you know are the single letter sounds, dipthongs and tripthongs.
When homeschooling our kids, I figured the highest level of literacy in the USA was in the Victorian Era.
I searched for school books from the era when adults of that era were educated, the 1830s and 1840s.
I found there were two sets of phonics rules that have been forgotten since that time, the silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
Once you know them, you can sound out almost every word in our crazy language.