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My nonsense detector goes off every time blacks are used as an example for why X is bad. It's the typical Boasian anthropology 'cart before the horse' thinking that permeates every single mainstream explanatory theory relating to the gaps between blacks and whites. So when a person who subscribes to Boasian anthropology presents a new battleground where they can potentially excuse the drastic differences between people with innate cognitive differences with some half baked social theory my brain just shuts off. I mean, honestly, do people never tire of this ridiculous rigamarole that is repeated again and again? Do they never start questioning or doubting the hope they feel in their hearts when this sort of theory gets peddled? The differences are there. They will always(within lifetime) be there. Just like there are dumb white kids who can't into reading properly there are dumb brown kids who can't either. And the distribution of these dumb kids between the different population groups is not the same.
It's important to be able to help dumb kids function in modern society but you can't couch that concern as a universal worry for all children. Kids have been learning how to read for centuries. With time, methods and materials that are so lacking by today's standards that it's not even comparable. By the same token I've seen kids take special classes for years with specially trained teachers that ultimately amounted to very little comparatively. I am sure the extra time helped compared to not having it, but you would never blame the problem those kids were having on the method. Those were obvious cases where the kids had issues.
So whilst there might be an interesting discussion relating to the efficacy of various teaching methods on 'normal' children there simply isn't any space for it in mainstream society. We have retarded ourselves to the point of being unable to accurately categorize reality and have methodologically reduced ourselves to rely on hopeful fiction. That is leaving aside the larger problems with 'teaching' kids in a classroom regardless of their affinity or ability.
But on the actual topic, I only have anecdotal experience as a student.
As a kid I remember not liking 'phonics' since I had a much easier time reading text than doing specific exercises. Especially if I had some way to contextualize the text I was going to be reading. I would not read letters but instead look at the words as symbols. So I lagged behind in reading through first and second grade since most of the 'reading' was just exercises. But through third grade and onward I had great scores for reading since the exercises were more narrative based. Which, I found, was much more entertaining than the boring exercises that centered around individual letters or words disconnected from context. Reading a text I could contextualize two or three times with someone next to me that could tell me what a word I didn't know was helped me learn quickly comparatively.
On the whole, if you can't teach normal kids how to read when they are locked in a room with you for hours, 5 days a week for years then you have issues beyond state mandated methodology and are probably just a bad and incapable person. I remember hearing stories of my relative's teacher from their years in elementary school in the early 80's. The teacher had no qualification other than his own literacy. They had only a few 'books' and of those the only ones designed for children were handwritten by the teacher himself. Yet somehow learning how to read was not an issue in that class despite the kids spending much less time there than they would today.
I feel that illustrates just how low the bar is when we are talking about teaching normal kids how to read. And how inconsequential teaching methodologies, textbooks and all the other crap that gets brought up might be when it comes to teaching something basic like reading. That's not to say all methods or environments are equal. But after a certain point, that is set very very low, you quickly start seeing diminishing returns. So when folks start looking that way for solutions to obviously giant problems I think it's more pertinent to ask why people are looking in such an obviously wrong direction.
Is English your mother tongue?
It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.
Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.
I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.
For me primary form of English is written, and I know spelling much better than pronunciation
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