Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
It goes into the conflict between phonics (sounding out words) and whole-language (also called whole-word, where you use memorization and cues to read) reading, and where the whole language method came from.
The short version was that it was developed by an educator in New Zealand, who found whole-language effective with kids who could not learn through phonics, and pushed to have it implemented generally.
The problem is that it does not work well for children who can learn through phonics, that the cognitive science does not back it up. (Eye tracking and similar studies show conclusively that competent readers do not use whole word.)
It looks like a replay of the "New Math", which, full disclosure, worked for me, but failed most of the students of the time.
The solution to failure was to double down on failure. It does not work.
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