In 1994, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) discovered that reading difficulties permeate all segments of the school-aged population. As a result, Congress asked the director of the National Institute of Child and Human Development (NICHD) and the former Secretary of Education to assemble a panel on reading. This National Reading Panel (NRP) proposed that systematic synthetic phonics instruction was effective in improving reading skills for children with learning disabilities and children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This paper discusses the findings of the NAEP, the NICHD, and the NRP; synthesizes research in reference to synthetic phonics, analytic phonics and systematic and embedded phonics instruction; and discusses study findings which support the usage of systematic synthetic phonics instruction as a means of improving reading skills of urban learners. The systematic synthetic phonics instruction is successful with struggling urban readers because the explicitness of the system does not penalize students for skills they have learned at home. (Contains 12 references.) (PM)