Can't suggest Sold a Story enough. It's a podcast miniseries by American Public Broadcasting (or APB) reporting everything that led to our current literacy crisis. It centers around an issue which might already be plainly obvious to some, which is the well-intentioned shift away from phonics-based reading education and the emphasis on variants of the three cueing system.
This could be a more valuable skill later down the line, but based on what I've heard so far it has been made to be a viable tactic for kids so young that they were left essentially reading by vibes and guesses. And parents had zero idea that their child's education had absorbed the idea that all kids can become literate through osmosis or something.
Like holy shit. I'd heard that the lesser emphasis on phonics was a big problem, but hadn't really understood what that meant. Hearing it explained in Sold a Story, I finally realized how so many kids had learned to read, and it was so buck wild I said "what the fuck" out loud.
