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Notes -
I'm not sure that "despite" belongs there for any sort of widespread policy, government or otherwise. It just seems to me that "is this thing almost certainly trash?" simply isn't a thought that crosses anyone's minds when implementing this kind of stuff, and certainly not when they're following it. It's more, "Can it convincingly appear to people, especially people I consider important, to be effective?"
But to get away from the snarky cynical aside, I must admit that I find myself feeling little vindicated at learning of this. I'm a Korean immigrant to the USA, and I had immense difficulty learning how to read English when I first moved here, starting from no English knowledge at 1st grade. There was one lesson that was a huge breakthrough for me, which was when my father sat me down one day and wrote out for me each of the 26 letters and then the Korean (Hangul) next to each that came closest to the pronunciation of that particular letter. (E.g. "아" for "a"). From then on, I was able to mentally map English letters to Hangul and sound them out that way, eventually internalizing the English directly and getting to the point where my English reading was better than my Korean.
This had its issues, since English doesn't neatly map letters to sounds like in Hangul. And not just exceptions, but just standard usage - e.g. is the letter "a" more commonly pronounced like in "dab" or like in "haha" or like in "anus?" I don't know. Whereas "아" is always - almost definitionally - pronounced like the "a" in "haha." But it was, in my case, still evidently good enough to use as a base to make me reach the point where my reading skills were indistinguishable from that of a native.
I always assumed that my experience was atypical. Now I'm wondering how many students learning English are suffering like I did, but without having access to that sort of breakthrough lesson where they're taught explicitly the phonemes of each letter.
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