I haven’t heard of swindled before. Forgive me, but I used an LLM to summarize it for me. Based on the summary, my professional analysis of the summary it gave me (again, I haven’t listened to it in total) would be that the podcast was critiquing the specific commercial product “Hooked on Phonics”, not phonics in general, and that the critiques involved this specific product being heavily marketed to parents (not educators) as being a panacea despite not utilizing best practices— even best phonics practices.

I’ve never used Hooked on Phonics specifically… again, it’s marketed toward parents, not educators. Some cursory, surface level research seems to show that early editions were especially bad, and in fact led to FTC citations for false advertising. Their marketing linked their product with phonics in general, which was generally untrue, and apparently the company didn’t even consult with experts (neither experts on phonics nor literacy in general!) when initially developing the program. So it sounds like they were probably a good source of material for a podcast on scams.

That doesn’t make phonics itself bad pedagogy. Phonics itself is fantastic, and produces the absolute best results.