After decades of effort, a decade of progress.

• Author: Mezzacappa, Dale
• Position: PHILADELPHIA

No major city in America has worked longer and harder on its dropout problem than Philadelphia. Yet those efforts, going back nearly half a century, have gained traction only in the last ten years. Between 2001 and 2009 the percentage of Philadelphia students who entered ninth grade and graduated in four years increased from 48 percent to 56 percent. Those gains might seem modest, and are clearly insufficient. But the fact that they occurred at all, and at a time when dropout rates nationally have not budged, suggests that Philadelphia is doing something right.

It's a measure of the complexity of the problem, however, that it is difficult to discern which of the flurry of policies and practices that have been tried here are responsible for the gains. Unlike in New York, Philadelphia has not followed a single blueprint or plan. Instead, the work on the issue has accreted over time, with new reforms and initiatives, most of them privately conceived or supported, added to the mix along the way. In the last five years the city has concentrated on providing students with an ever-growing array of options to the city's traditional high schools--charter schools, small alternative or "accelerated" schools--based on students' needs and inclination. Yet some of the most promising experiments in reform have also occurred in the city's traditional high schools, which the vast majority of its students still attend. But for bureaucratic and budgetary reasons those initiatives have seldom been sustained. If Philadelphia wants to continue to make progress, it'll have to find a way to do so, and the Obama administration's efforts to combat the dropout problem could provide some real help.

In 1968, Philadelphia's business, political, and civic elite got together to figure out how to get more high school kids to stay in school and prevent them from being swept up in the maelstrom of anger and urban violence touched off by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The year before, as many as 3,500 African American students demonstrated at school district headquarters demanding better schools, more black teachers, and culturally relevant courses and textbooks.

The big idea the leaders formulated was career academies: subunits within large neighborhood schools that blended academics with a vocational training and established stronger relationships between students and their peers and teachers. The first such academy in the nation, focused on preparing students for jobs in the electrical field, opened in 1969 at Thomas Edison High School, which had the highest dropout rate in the city. New career academies were started throughout the 1970s and '80s, and by the mid-'90s there were twenty-nine in the city and several thousand nationwide. Extensive research deemed the academies to be a successful anti-dropout strategy.

Over the next thirty years, with strong support and substantial nudging from the city's foundations and private sector, the school district would attack the dropout problem in a number...