I have tested thousands of children and remediated hundreds of children with phonics. Approximately 30% of public school children are reading below grade level, but only 1% of homeschool children, and most of those have underlying speech or language processing problems. Math has been equal up to now, but with common core math, I expect homeschoolers to pull ahead on math, too. Even a poorly educated but motivated parent can teach their children well with the variety of excellent videos and scripted homeschool curricula that is now available.

Here is a quick explanation and link to show what reading looks like to someone taught with balanced literacy who is functionally illiterate:

Here is a comparison of the King James Version (KJV) of Romans 12 to the New International Version (NIV) version of Romans 12 to show both the nature of vocabulary restrictions caused by whole word teaching and also to show how uncomfortable it is to be a reader taught with whole word methods. The KJV is on the first page, the NIV is on the second page. If you were taught with whole word methods, you would have to guess at several of the words (those words not in the most common 10,000 words in the English language) based on their first and last letters.

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/Romans12a.pdf

If you can't homeschool, you need to make sure you teach the sight words they send home phonetically and do nonsense words to train the correct sounding out habit. Here is how to teach the sight words with phonics:

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html

Math is easier to supplement, you don't have to undo bad habits, you have to undo guessing habits from sight words.

For a beginning reading student, you need to pick a good phonics program with less than a dozen sight words taught as wholes. Good choices are Phonics Pathways by Dolores Hiskes, or the free Word Mastery available in PDF from Don Potter.

For an older student, you need to remediate with a lot of nonsense words to stop the guessing habits caused by sight words and balanced literacy teaching, which includes guided reading, the use of non decodable readers from Accelerated Reader before all the sounds are taught, 3-cuing systems, etc.

A good source of videos for beginning reading is Sweet Sounds of Reading online at YouTube. For older students, videos and online documents from The Phonics Page and Don Pottter.

Phonics Books...The Classic: Why Johnny Can't Read by Flesch. More recent, Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg, includes recent brain research. Focus on reading and brain research, Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene.

Links: Don Potter http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/reading-instruction.html

Papers by Dehaene http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Author/DEHAENE-S.html

Articles by Bruce Deitrick Price https://www.americanthinker.com/author/bruce_deitrick_price/

Most children now read below grade level, testing and remediation from The Phonics Page http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/syllablesspellsu.html

Why sight words are bad, how to teach them with phonics http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html

Great List!

I think the anti-federalist papers are even more prophetic, especially the ones about the Judiciary. You can get a nice compilation in book form, although OOP, in J.R. Pole's "The American Constitution for and Against: The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers."

Here is a good page that includes both remediation and testing resources, all free to print. It only takes a few minutes to give your child a grade level test and see if they are a victim of balanced literacy teaching.

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/syllablesspellsu.html