re: “She went into a tirade about how inferior phonics was.”
This is fascinating to me. People in ed schools learn almost nothing, but what they do learn is destructive.
The reason I had to homeschool was that my second son had been taught no phonics and could not read any word that had more than six letters.
I found out later that the new principle had brought in his own friends who were schooled in sight-reading. He was fired after two years. It appeared that even the school board did not know what he was doing until parents began to complain loudly. One of his friends turned out to be a pedophile. He called me twice to find out if he could take my son fishing. Talk about my cackles being raised.
But the non-reading damage was done. It took me four years after my discovery to fix the problem which included homeschooling and two separate specialized tutors I hired to fix specific aspects to his reading problem. $25,000 that should have went into a college fund.
Thank God I had homeschooling to fall back on.