It costs the USA, 300 million people, $24 billion. That's around $100 per person. Not a lot. If we only include people who would be taught, that's still 20% of the population. Only $500 per person. And remember, a lot of this money is spent on things other than just "pronunciation, reading and writing". It's spent on improving grammar, spreading false "folk linguistics" bs, and much more bs. A teacher makes around $45k a year, and coincidentally, there are just around 100 student per English teacher. $5000 spent on bureaucracy. That's it! Not a lot of money, it's less than 0.5% of our debt ($13~18 trillion). In addition, standardizing "English" naturally leads to discrimination and ethnic nationalism. Think about it this way, in the thing we call "English" there exist maybe a hundred separate dialects, pidgins, creoles, and maybe even completely separate languages. There's a reason they're dialects, the pronunciation is far different in each one. "a" has separate pronunciations and splits, and can be /ɑ~æ~ə/ in completely separate environs for each dialect. Consider the differences between Scots and AAVE. You won't be able to create a standardized orthography able to handle both languages without having some blind space! You'll end up with a situation like Spain, where alternative languilects are/were seen as a national security threats, or like Italy, where actually different languages are seen as "just a dialect". Yeah, because Navajo and Cherokee are just "mispronounced and mispelled" English .Also, there's no such thing as a mispronunciation if most of the people around you do the same! It's called dialectal difference.These English language threads are obnoxious at best and racist and offensive at worse. The existence of phonograms only further suggests that the Latin alphabet, as used to write English is a defective alphabet.