I don't think a big bang approach will work, but gradual small changes which don't conflict with local Standard English pronunciations will, and is already happ

I don't think a big bang approach will work, but gradual small changes which don't conflict with local Standard English pronunciations will, and is already happening. I pronounce "herd", "bird" and "word" with different vowels, which can be reliably predicted from the spelling. I pronounce "good" and "food" with the same vowel. Most spelling reformers merge the first three and distinguish the second two, because their accent does that. A better approach would be to distinguish them all. A few words with silent letters could be simplified, e.g. "knight" and "night" could both be spelt "nite" and disambiguated in context, as all accents agree they're homophones. Webster did get a few limited spelling reforms adopted in the USA, however. Other Americanisms are gradually being adopted. Hardly anyone in the USA writes "theatre" nowadays (as in "Firesign Theatre"), and in the UK we no longer write "computer programme". I still hold out with "connexion" (from Latin "connexio") but it's becoming a lost cause. There's been a regression with "-ize" (the spelling favoured by Fowler and the OED), now increasingly spelt "-ise" in the UK, largely I suspect due to Microsoft's spelling checker.