To prepare young people for productive and satisfying adult lives in the competitive global marketplace, local high schools and employers are being asked to develop effective school-to-work programs. These programs have an important place in the school reform movement, because they change the nature of high school for their students by utilizing the experiences and knowledge contained in modern workplaces. The school-to-work movement was handicapped, however, by a lack of information about communities that had already created innovative combinations of improved high school education and work-based learning.

To remedy this situation, MDRC launched in 1991 the School-to-Work Transition Project, the organization’s first effort in the field of K-12 education. The project was the logical outgrowth both of MDRC’s long-standing commitment to youth employment issues and its burgeoning interest in high school reforms. The project was an investigation of 16 pioneering school-to-work programs. Programs were chosen because they represented a wide variety of approaches and had enough operational experience to provide start-up and implementation lessons for others.