It'd certainly give phonics a boost. Make it so clearly preferable to whatever that other thang is called as to make it casual to the most obvious observer.

I think the most common is the International Phonetic Alphabet:

(http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipachart.html)

It has fairly obvious drawbacks for everyday use, not the least of which would be a whole new keyboard. There is a standard font version floating around somewhere that I saw recently. Probably googlable by the persistent searcher.