Spelling

My niece is considering sending her child to private school because
they don't have spelling in the her son's class. The reason given is
that some people in the class are not native English speakers. Does
that reason make sense to anyone? It doesn't to me.

I never learned to spell until I learned to type because up to then I
didn't read the individual letters in the word (I was taught the whole
word method rather than phonics). But with all the texting etc that
goes on, spelling seems to be almost irrelevant.

My sister (whose grandchild this is), is a newspaper editor and she is
mentoring a freshman student at one of the Ivy League schools. She
says he has several times he has misspelled a word (college) but in
misspelling it, he has spelled another word correctly (collage), and
of course a spell checker doesn't pick that up. She asked if
spelling was just not taught anymore.