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I had the misfortune to sit through a two hour lecture with no breaks about The Science of Reading (tm) with a room full of elementary school teachers a month or so ago. I immediately forgot almost everything, but the part I retained was that children are more likely to be able to read passages if they know something about the topic. This seemed blindingly obvious, but apparently educationalists only now realized it. They gave an example of an average elementary school teacher trying to read a passage about cricket, written for an audience of cricket enthusiasts, along with referencing some study where the thing found to be the strongest indicator of high schoolers ability to decode a passage about baseball was not so much reading level in general, but rather knowledge of baseball. They recommended organizing books more by topic than by reading level, and teaching kids actual things about the world. My father, who taught rather low skill high school readers, had moderate success getting them to read A Child Called It. Simple common words, shocking emotional story, likable narrator, familiar settings of home and school. They could generally decode the phonemes, but didn't have very much background knowledge, vocabulary, or tenacity.
The district is using LETRS (phonics based) and CLKA (core knowledge) curriculums. I was working in the school for over two years before finding out what any of the CKLA topics were. I had asked a couple of times, but both teachers and children seemed confused by the question. It turns out they're studying normal things like Greece, Rome, Astronomy, Geology, and so on, at predictable times of year, which is actually useful for me to know. We have a full time "instructional coach," but had never heard this mentioned before, despite asking.
Anyway, probably part of the issue is that Science of Reading types are lumping together several different things under "reading." A person can't read if they can't convert arrangements of letters into sounds, and then into already known words. Hence, schools that skip phonics are in bad shape. They also can't read if they don't know the meanings of enough of the written words yet, hence the CKLA and sportsball passage examples. Apparently some teachers prefer teaching the latter to the former, but still accept lower elementary positions, then neglect the phonics in favor of the "language rich environment" and "background knowledge" stuff.
Some smaller schools try to mitigate the "teaching phonics is dull and uncreative" effect by having teachers follow their students up the grade levels, only having to teaching phonics once every six years of so if they do it right. The preferred method seems to be to "offer more professional development" and "gather more data,"and occasionally yell at teachers.
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