How has Mayor Nutter done during his tenure?

Mayor Nutter wants Philadelphians to take a look at the numbers and see how their city has done over the last seven years with him at the helm.

The murder rate has hit a historic low, jobs have trickled back into town, and the city is putting more money into its schools than at any time in 30 years.

Experts eye those numbers and say yes, but consider: Crime fell nationwide, as did joblessness. The schools are running on bare-bones budgets, and Philadelphia still has the highest poverty rate among big cities.

Nutter issued his report last month comparing his tenure with those of three mayors who preceded him. He followed up with a detailed brochure of achievements featured prominently on the city's website.

The mayor was mindful that candidates hoping to succeed him have started circling.

"This is important data for people to have. It also creates a baseline as we look forward," he said Jan. 15 at a briefing about the stats. "We've been through some very, very tough times, but as many others are seeing, Philadelphia is a city on the rise, and citizens need to see that as well."

Is he right?

With some caveats and conditions, outside experts interviewed for this article said Nutter's evaluation was roughly accurate.

They do not doubt his numbers; they do take issue with whether he deserves credit for all of them.

"Is he fully responsible for all the good or bad? The answer is no," said economist Joel Naroff. "A city operates in the context of a regional economy and state funding, and that's why, if the state is not doing well, if the state is not funding you, there's only so much the mayor can do. But in that context, he's done pretty well."

Philadelphia reclaimed the jobs it lost during the recession and added 4,164 more, the report said.

That's more than the state or the metropolitan region has accomplished, Naroff said. "You've got a situation where the city has actually outperformed the state in terms of jobs. When was the last time we could say that about Philadelphia?"

The city's population has grown for seven consecutive years, and Naroff believes that will continue. He credits the chief executive's part in that, saying Nutter "has created an image of the city that's impressive and that lays the foundation for further population growth."

Another economist, Adam Ozimek of Moody's Analytics, offered some context. Philadelphia may have had an easier time bouncing back from the Great Recession, he said, because it didn't get hit as hard in the first place as some other major cities.

The city's wage-tax rate dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.9 percent - continuing a gradual decline that was set in motion before Nutter took office - but it's still high, Ozimek said. He noted that the city's 7.1 percent unemployment rate - its lowest since April 2008 - is still above the national average.

"If growth in Philadelphia doesn't start to pick up, the city is going to fall behind. Unemployment has declined quickly over the last year," Ozimek said. "But part of this is that people are dropping out of the labor force and giving up searching for jobs, which isn't something to celebrate."

Facing a big drop-off in state funding under then-Gov. Tom Corbett, Nutter's administration wound up pouring more dollars into schools than any of the last three mayors. Since taking office in 2008, he increased local funding 42 percent to $363 million.

His report says his predecessor, Mayor John F. Street, added $253 million; Street's predecessor, Ed Rendell - who inherited a mammoth deficit from his predecessor, W. Wilson Goode - increased school funding by $70 million. (Goode increased it by $183 million.) The report doesn't account for inflation, but economists said that if it did, Nutter's total on school funding would loom even larger.

Donna Cooper, head of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth, applauded Nutter and City Council for finding ways to fund schools.

"We're such an underfunded district, but we still have a respectable local share," said Cooper, formerly a policy aide to then-Gov. Rendell.

But Cooper had no praise for Nutter or any other officeholders for what she sees as their failure to break through the politics and secure adequate state aid for the district: "The mayor failed, Council failed, our political leadership failed."

Graduation rates - a major focus of Nutter's administration - have increased recently, but barely: from 64 percent in the 2012-13 school year to 65 percent last year.

More concerning to Cooper are data she says suggest many seniors graduate unprepared: "We need to avoid walking along the pathway of empty diplomas. We need to know with some certainty that our kids are graduating able to read, write, compute, and understand American history and science at a 12th-grade level."

No one disputes that crime in Philadelphia is down. But it's pretty much down everywhere else, too.

Since 2008, homicides in the city have declined almost 37 percent, from 391 in 2007 to 248 in 2014 - the lowest since 1967.

Violent crime has also declined since 2007.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminal justice professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said the decline in homicides and violent crimes followed a national trend over the last 30 years.

"We had a major drop between 1993 and 2000 in murder and robbery, largely because of the decay of the crack markets," Blumstein said. "Since 2000, things were rather stable, and then in the last few years, since about 2009, we saw more decline."

Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has been at the helm for both Nutter terms, unlike some previous administrations, which switched chiefs.

"The mayor, since he oversees the chief, deserves some credit," Blumstein said. "Perhaps largely because he will inevitably also get blamed when things go the other way."

The blemish on Nutter's Philadelphia fact sheet is the number of poor.

Over 30 years, the city's poverty rate has consistently been higher than state and national levels. It is, however, decreasing at a faster pace than state or national rates.

It's a reality Nutter points out and says needs to be addressed.

Deep poverty "is beyond any single mayor, but the mayor certainly can make a dent and should be setting a precedent," said Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities and an associate professor at Drexel University.

She faulted Nutter's vetoes of bills requiring larger employers to offer paid sick leave, given the number of residents living in poverty, and said she hoped Council would pass the amended bill now in the works. Nutter has suggested he would sign this time.

Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the SHARE Food Program, which fights hunger in the city, credited Nutter's support of a new citywide Food Policy Advisory Council.

Wynn looked over Nutter's 24-slide report. She said she was encouraged by the gains, but said that unless serious attention was paid to the poor, the picture wasn't complete.

"Why would there be so many folks in our city living below poverty," Wynn said, "if everything was peachy-keen?"

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