There never was a reading war. A war assumes there are two armies meeting on a field of battle. This didn’t happen. But there was a reading coup. There was a hostile takeover of the field of literacy instruction by profiteers who saw public education as their own private ATM machine. This group of profiteers is part of the educational industrial complex which includes Cambium-Lexia Learning, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, Hough Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Voyager Sopris Learning, TAL Education Group, Bright Horizons, and KinderCare Learning. Their armies of well-paid toadies (consultants) promise schools simple solutions to complex problems.

“Just buy our shiny new products,” they say. “Pay for our services,” they say. “Get trained by our experts,” they say, “and all your literacy problems will go away. All your students will be reading above grade level.”

“Well, I don’t know,” the school says. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Look,” they say, “look at all the colorful charts and graphs. Look at all the pretty, pretty numbers.”

“Well,” the school says, “you do have numbers. That must mean it’s real.”

“Wouldn’t you like to have colorful charts and graphs like this? Wouldn’t you like to have pretty, pretty numbers?”

“Yes,” the school says. “Yes, I would.”

And that, my friends, is how education lost its soul.

Neuroscience is a study of the nervous system including the brain, spinal cord, and neurons (NIH, 2025). The neuroscience of reading looks at how the brain functions during reading using imaging techniques to detect blood flow and electrical energy (Gotlieb, et al., 2022). Cognitive science is based on the word ‘cognition’ which means thinking. Cognitive science looks at human thinking (Robinson-Riegler & Robinson-Riegler, 2012). One studies the physical brain as it thinks and the other studies the thinking the brain does. But we can’t observe thinking directly. We can only observe the effects of thinking. Thus, both fields look at the effects of thinking to make deductions about thinking itself.

The first part of this podcast is designed to help you understand how reading works from a purely cognitive perspective. This provides an important context for the second part where I examine the theory of orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014). Orthographic mapping is a theory based on logical deductions made from research. The questions we must ask are how robust is the theory, how valid are the data upon which it is based, and how logical are the deductions? My conclusions are, not very, not very, and not very.

In this podcast, I try to make sense of orthographic mapping, a term invented by Linnea Ehri and introduced in Chapter 15 (Ehri, 2014). We’ll start with her definition:

“Orthographic mapping occurs when, in the course of reading specific words, readers form connections between written unit, either single graphemes or larger spelling patterns, and spoken units, either phonemes, syllables, or morphemes. These connections are retained in memory along with meanings and enable readers to recognize words by sight. An important consequence of orthographic mapping is that the spellings of words enter memory and influence vocabulary learning, the processing of phonological constituents in words, and phonological memory” (Ehri, 2014, pp. 5-6)

This is written with all the stunning clarity of a Rorschach inkblot. Let’s do a bit of unpack-O-rating.