Institutional promotion of this "new style" of teaching reading is garbage cope and grift. Schools have been teaching reading successfully for decades to kids who are prepared to learn it, using a long-proven curriculum.

Middle and lower-middle class kids arrive in primary school already pre-literate and prepared to further learn at primary school level. Due to parental habits.

Statistically speaking, lower class kids arrive without the same number of years of preparation at the same level. They do not arrive pre-literate. They arrive illiterate.

I agree that special attention and programs need to be implemented to make up for this state of affairs, but lets not reward grifters and their unqualified media lackeys with attention simply because the public doesn't understand how literacy development works, in general, and these people are willing to exploit that.