Letter of the Week?

Any Kindergarten teachers still teach using letter of the week? All but one K teacher at the school where I work still uses this method following Harcourts introduction of the letters ie, Mm, Ss, Rr, Tt etc... The reading teachers in the building were taking to me about how they don't agree with that approach and I started researching it and there is a LOT of info against that method.

They also teach penmanship/handwriting following the letter of the week and now that's it's the end of January they have only taught them formally how to write 1/2 the upper/lowercase alphabet.

Are there any advantages to teaching using this method? I'm trying to figure out why the teachers are so resistant to discontinuing the whole letter of the week thing, especially since that is so much info out that stating that it stinks... It's also frustrating to me as the buildings OT because they are progressing them sooooo slowly through handwriting that the students have developed really bad handwriting habits.

Letter of the Week?

My school doesn't do that in K, but the pre-k students do that.