You miss the entire point of the Spelling Bee. It's not to teach the masses spelling, it's to reward exceptional individuals who have gone above and beyond what is expected.
We do not have counting bees, because nobody would ever miss. "What comes after 1024?" "1025!" Right, and so ends the 10,001,027th round of the Counting Bee, which started five years ago today..."
In other countries they do not have spelling bees, for the same reason. Spelling should be easy and natural, and when it follows the rules of alphabetic writing, it is. But English spelling breaks the rules, because our authorities have been too brainless, spineless and lazy to fix it. So we, and we alone, waste all this time and even have contests where we marvel that some genius can do what every six year old elsewhere does naturally.
The Bee is fun and contests are good things, but there are far more worthy things to do with that effort than memorize irrational spellings. We should fix our spelling and then have a Vocabulary Bee.