Despite decades of school improvement initiatives, many young people still do not cross the finish line of secondary education with the credential that signifies success--a high school diploma. Thousands of young people give up on school and on themselves, or schools give up on them. Without effective support from schools, communities, and families, many at-risk students fall through the cracks and eventually drop out. Persistent high dropout rates are particularly troublesome in large, urban high schools and in poor and rural districts. Young people who drop out of school have few prospects for earning a living wage, which takes an economic and societal toll that cannot be sustained in a competitive nation. Recently, stemming the tide on these--dropout factories, where upwards of 50 percent of students do not graduate, has become a national, state, and local priority. In its Fiscal Year 2010 budget request, the Obama administration proposes a $50 million High School Graduation Initiative to promote innovative strategies for increasing high school graduation rates. This report summarizes the research on "why" students drop out of school, explains the research implications for "how" to create an integrated dropout prevention strategy, and highlights an innovative pilot project that yielded results in a matter of months--a "how-to" example that works. (Contains 8 figures and 3 footnotes.)