Heck ... now that's what I call a zombie thread.
I'm tempted to walk on by, but I can't resist a bit of saidism with my morning coffee. I think there are some misconceptions here that we need to talk about.
First, we have the "blame the schools" argument. How could schools possibly give advice as poor as "said is dead"?
Part of the answer, I think, is that some teachers may not actually be saying that. Sometimes a teacher will give a long and carefully balanced explanation, but the students will only take from it the one or two nuggets that resonate with them. We all like simple rules. So sometimes the problem is not with the teachers, but in how the well the students have absorbed the lesson.
Of course, schools are not necessarily trying to take kids to a publishable standard. They are trying to get them to express themselves, to be creative, to learn about language, to make their scenes more vivid. If that means the writing is a little purple, then why not?
Then we have the idea that saidisms are automatically bad writing. I think we need to put this into context. The modern fashion is to use the word said and to avoid synonyms for said including "said xxxly".
But try this - pick up just about any classic novel from say more than fifty years ago and look at a few pages at random. And there is a very good chance that you are going to find people crying, replying, ejaculating, expostulating. Not to mention saying thusly and thatly.
I tried that and couldn't find an older novel on my bookshelves that didn't break the modern diktats about said. For that matter, I found a few highly successful modern novels which also happily broke the rules, including the first Harry Potter with its many said xxlys.
Highly successful books - many of them classics - all breaking the saidism rules. Hmmm.
This aversion to said is a modern fashion which may well change in the future. We may find that other new rules come in which make our current writing seem old-fashioned. For all we know, said might disappear to be replaced by an even simpler attribution, such as a simply colon:
Fred: I love you.
Emily: I know.
Or we may go back to grunting and ejaculating? Fifty shades of said?
So is it bad writing per se - or simply writing that is currently considered to be bad?
I think we can all agree that overusing any one type of attribution can look awkward. A page full of saids can be boring. A page full of whispers, cries, grunts and yips can be noisy and confusing. And I hate reading line after line of unattributed dialogue where I have to count back to work out who the hell is saying what.
But we need to be careful that we don't turn this into an author obsession. Readers don't seem to care about it as much as we do. I have seen authors worry about said so much that they forget to tell an interesting story or develop rounded characters.
Incidentally, I'm with Kallithrix on the question of said vs asked. As a reader it feels artificial to me if a character says a question. That seems to be an author trying very hard to avoid saying anything other than said. We can take the aversion to non-saids a little too far.
Someone far cleverer than me (which isn't hard) said that the actual dialogue should be so zingy that we don't need to point out who said it, how they said it or how they were feeling when they said it. I think that's the main point here - not what can sometimes be a slightly dogmatic addiction to said and an aversion to anything that isn't said.