Yup, he continued the travesty but it was started in the USA in 1838, by one of the original Massholes, Horace Mann.
BTW, since you mentioned a Russian, English is a mess of silent and substitute letters. There are no such things in the Russian language. You simply pronounce every letter.
We'd be far better off to "steal" the Russian language and adopt it as their own.
They've stolen enough of our inventions, proper payback would be stealing their language.
Conjugation and declension are simpler in Russian too. Just add one of 10 endings.
He really believed his crazy ideas were best for teaching reading.
English used to be spelled phonetically like German or Russian. It got frenchified after the Norman conquest.