Teachers should be concerned with the prevention of reading disabilities rather than emphasizing remediation. Many deprived children in our inner cities are deficient in areas necessary for successful learning. Characteristics of deprived, inner city children which cause learning problems are listening, speaking, experiences, mobility, immediate physical needs, abstractions, best learning, and mismatched systems. Basal readers exhibit characteristics which cause problems for inner city children: (1) over reliance on configuration of context clues, (2) disparity between child's spoken language and book language, (3) lack of sufficient practice and exercise in skills learned in different settings, (4) gaps in instruction and the thinking process, (5) attempting too much, and (6) stressing an analytic method. A study comparing an analytic and synthetic method of teaching reading was conducted on 420 inner city kindergarten children. Eighty-one matched pairs were assigned to three control and three experimental classes. By the end of the second grade the experimental structured reading program proved to be more effective for the total group in spelling of phonetically regular words, freedom from spelling reversals, and number of words and sentences written. (WR)