You should read Rudolph Flesch's books (now mostly out of print but still extremely relevant).
The only way to innoculate kids from a bad reading curriculum at school is to teach them to read at home BEFORE they get to school. If your kid is not motivated before age 5, which many are not, then they get trapped in the "whole word" method still used by over 85% of schools to teach reading - of which the phonics content is abysmally low.
My kid skipped kindergarten and started in 1st grade because her knowledge of the basics was so good. The school, that year, decided to switch to the whole word method and bought hundreds of very pretty books with terrific pictures, no phonics, and one sentence per page under each huge pretty picture. And what happened ? No kid learned to read more than the most basic of words because the pictures were so big the words were lost.
What happened next ? (This was a parochial school, not a public school BTW) The 1st grade teachers went to the principal, told her that after 5 weeks in all previous years using phonics they'd had a class of readers. Now, only a few, who'd started school reading, were still doing so, and those kids were not progressing, and the others were not doing well either. The school went back to the old books and by the end of November the kids were all back on track, most reading at a 2nd or 3rd grade level or better by the end of the school year.
The lesson - there is no substitute for good teaching and a good curriculum, no matter whether the teacher is mom or the school. Those kids were trying but were not learning thru no fault of their own.
I've heard that the push behind teaching whole word is that is how most adults read. You don't sound out each letter unless it is an unfamiliar word, you just look at the word and know what it means. So the education "experts" figured that since that is the point where people end up, you might as well start there. However, that makes as much sense as prohibiting infants from crawling and insisting on teaching them to walk immediately. Without learning the motor skills needed to crawl, only a lucky few would be able to learn how to walk. Similarly, without early phonics only a lucky few will become skilled readers with the hole word method.