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From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.
I think people fret far too much about reading happening at home. Maybe there are some edge cases where mom reading bedtime story helps out, but the biggest issue still seems to me happening when that sperm hits that egg, and sometimes what happened during the 9 months of pregnancy. My son just like, looks at books himself. He can't read (to my knowledge there is no such thing as a kid as young as him doing so), but he recites them on his own. I can hear him in the other room "reading" books to himself. I suppose in a world totally devoid of reading at home he couldn't do THAT, but he'd be doing some other thing that smart kids do. He'd be inventing his own stories (he also does this), he be practicing whatever new thing he discovered (like skipping about a month ago). The difference in self-play amongst kids is pretty vast. The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture.
What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).
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