Despite recent efforts at compensatory education, thousands of children still go through first grade each year without learning to read. More often than not, these are children of the poor. The underlying assumption of this study is that the major attempt at educational compensation for disadvantaged children have failed because of fundamental misconceptions about what is needed to help these children learn. Many children have trouble learning to read because they do not know how to recognize, manipulate, and blend the kinds of sounds that letters stand for--the phonemes. It is argued that previous attempts to teach reading presuppose rather than supply these subskills, which middle-class children usually learn from their home environment. A tutorial program is described that should enable these children to learn to read by the end of the first grade. Favorable results of field research in which low income, minority group first graders learned to read competently with this program when tutored by community adults are presented. (MKM)