In November 1980, the National Institute of Education (NIE) sponsored a roundtable on Issues in Urban Reading, the proceedings and recommendations of which are included in this paper and focused on two major questions: What is contributing to the drop in reading scores during the elementary and middle school years? and What are the skills and characteristics black children bring to the classroom? Following a foreword, the paper first presents the roundtable agenda, and a summary of the proceedings. The major portion of the report contains the papers presented by participants of the conference on the following seven topics: (1) issues on urban reading: a sociolinguistic perspective, (2) the competency based approach for urban children, (3) context and ethnography of urban reading programs, (4) learning theory and the reading problems of urban black children, (5) issues in urban reading: expanding the current NIE agenda, (6) research recommendations for an urban reading study, and (7) reading achievement and the social-cultural frame of reference of Afro-American children. (HTH)