Kentucky Department of Education

High Schools That Work is a comprehensive, results-based school improvement initiative of the Southern Regional Education Board in cooperation with State Departments of Education.  This initiative provides a framework of goals, key practices, and key conditions, which is designed to blend the essential content of traditional-college preparatory studies with quality career/technical studies to raise student achievement.  The goals include raising the reading, mathematics, science, and technical achievement of more students to the national average and above.

Goals and Conditions
HSTW provides a framework of goals and key conditions for accelerating learning and setting higher standards.  It recommends actions that provide direction to schools as they work to improve academic and vocational-technical instruction at school and the work site.

Key Practices of HSTW
The HSTW effort is based on ten key practices that, when embraced and implemented by a majority of the staff, will accelerate student achievement.

Southern Regional Education Board
High Schools That Work is the largest and oldest of the Southern Regional Education Board's seven school-improvement initiatives for high school and middle grades leaders and teachers. More than 1,100 HSTW sites in 27 states are using the HSTW framework of goals and key practices to raise student achievement.  

Project Lead The Way (PLTW)
The primary goal of PLTW is to grow the nation's technology workforce (engineers and technicians).  Currently, 1,300,000 engineering/engineering technology jobs are available in the U.S. without trained people to fill them.  The PLTW curriculum provides the kind of student work that helps students reach higher standards in the academic core.