Shaping schools for the world of work.

"Among the industrial nations we have one of the worst systems for getting people from school to work," says Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich. Some would call it no system at all. But there are high schools that are actively trying to mesh school and work in ways that make sense to students and that help them go from one to the other.

A new federal law, the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, authorizes about $300 million in grants for states and communities to create better programs for high school students who don't plan to go to college.

Some programs already exist that combine traditional classroom work with vocational learning. The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit organization based in New York, investigated 16 of them around the country and reported its findings in February.

MDRC classified the 16 programs as: career academies, which focus on one occupational area such as health, finance or electronics; tech prep, which provides technical instruction and works with community college requirements; apprenticeships with programs developed jointly by educators and employers; occupational/academic clusters in which students choose a sequence of related academic and occupational courses; and "restructured vocational education," which gives students a sampling of varied jobs. The size of the programs varies widely, as...