https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/k12_sightwords_are_a_sick_joke.html
Don’t be misled by the anti-phonics hustle. These people want to make everything complicated, murky, and painfully slow. In fact, children should typically learn to read in the first year of school. Anything less than that, you’re fighting the sight-word Ponzi scheme.
Sight-words are a Ponzi scheme because, at first, progress can seem rapid. This illusion turns out to be a curse. Children can’t escape from their bad habits, and they rarely become good readers.
Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?, a lively short explanation of problems in K–12.