During the 1990's, an educational reform movement known as School to Work has emerged largely due to the rapidly changing workplace and the need for a highly skilled workforce. In 1990, a report by the National Center on Education and the Economy, titled America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, called this change "a third industrial revolution, brought about by the use of computers, high speed communication and universal education." The report concluded that in order to be economically competitive in the global economy that Americans must have high skills. The key to achieving higher skills, the report concluded, was an educational system with new higher performance standards for all students to meet.

The following year in 1991, the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) issued a report, "What Work Requires of Schools." The Commission's report examined the changing workforce and why reform in both schools and the private sector was necessary. The SCANS report identified five workplace competencies and a three-part foundation of skills and personal qualities that all workers should possess for entry-level job performance.

COMPETENCIES – effective workers can productively use:

• Resources: allocating time, money, materials, space, and staff;

• Interpersonal Skills: working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds;

• Information: acquiring and evaluating data, organizing and maintaining files, interpreting and communicating, and using computers to process information;

• Systems: understanding social, organizational, and technological systems, monitoring and correcting performance, and designing or improving systems;

• Technology: selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks and maintaining and troubleshooting technologies.

THE FOUNDATION – competence requires:

• Basic Skills: reading, writing, arithmetic and mathematics, speaking, and listening;

• Thinking Skills: thinking creatively, making decisions, solving problems, seeing things in the mind's eye, knowing how to learn, and reasoning;

• Personal Qualities: individual responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity.

The SCANS report became key to the development of educational programs intended to strengthen the transition from school to the workplace.

The call for higher skills and standards was supported by U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, who explained in 1993: "In the new global economy, the only resource that is really rooted in a nation – the ultimate source of all of its wealth – is its people. To compete and win, our workforce must be well educated, well trained, and highly skilled." With the support of Congress, Reich and the Clinton administration took action to initiate educational reform that would create a School to Work system in American public education with the passage of the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994. This law was designed in part to "improve the knowledge and skills of youth by integrating academic and occupational learning, integrating school-based and work-based learning and building effective linkages between secondary and post-secondary education."

New York State acted quickly to implement the changes in the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994 by providing venture capital in the form of grants to local consortia and regional partnerships. Locally, the Oswego County Workforce Preparation Partnership was formed and was the School to Work consortium to which the Central Square Central School District belonged.

At about the same time as these federal changes were being implemented, New York State was developing an initiative to establish learning goals within and across disciplines and recommendations for their assessment. New York State's learning standards are documents that provide direction to schools as they create curricula to meet the needs of their students. These standards describe learning goals and identify performance indicators at different levels of education.

One of the seven New York State learning standards is the Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS) learning standard. This standard seeks to provide all students with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to move successfully from school to work prepared for the technology driven workplace and the global economy.