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IMHO the root cause of this problem is found in our colleges and their associated tenure system.

The goal of almost every college professor is tenure - aka near absolute job security that continues until you want to retire. A family example is my Uncle who wrote a text book in the mid 1970s at age 40ish, gained tenure, and is still teaching at 72. Most, if not all of this is based on that 1976 era text book and its reprints.

To gain tenure you have to publish. This normally means text books. Since you have your textbook on the subject you are teaching all of your students have to buy your textbook. At 20-50 students a session, 2-3 sessions a year, this gets into some real money after a decade or three.

So what happens to this market logic if you don't come up with something new every generation or so?

There is no money or tenure in teaching something cast in concrete - see the collapse of the classical (Greek and Latin) based programs in our university systems along with the explosive growth in gender/racial based programs.

The textbook publishing industry has always seemed to be a bit of a scam. After all, how much have English or math actually progressed in the past 100 years which have required complete the textbooks to be rewritten every three years or so? Sure, some of the problems with Johnny having 6 phonograph records in one pile and 8 in another pile might need to be updated every decade, but how has 6+8 changed? It seems like we have taken a system with hundreds of years of experience in how children learn and thrown it out so some publishing companies can make money writing new elementary and high school text books with less efficient methods.

As for me, I don't remember whether I learned by phonics or the look-say method. The school taught phonics-phonics-phonics, but I could read before first grade. Math had way too many of the new math "set theory" topics, but I do remember lots of addition and multiplication drills.