"This first approach to integrating vocational and academic education has many obvious advantages. It can be done within existing vocational courses without much disruption or expense; it does not require the coordination of large groups of teachers (save possibly for the process of developing model curricula). It has the potential for increasing the academic capacities of vocational students as technical requirements of occupations increase. For those students who have not mastered the basics of reading, writing, and math, this approach can improve basic skills in a way that is more concrete and more clearly related to students' occupational futures and current vocational preparations than are the conventional academic classrooms. It can also serve as a crucial first step in a longer process of integrating vocational and academic education.

However, the ambitions of this first model are limited. The academic competencies which have been most frequently stressed are relatively simple, in some cases embarrassingly so. More to the point, this model does nothing to change the essential division between vocational and academic courses, between vocational and academic teachers (since academic teachers need never be involved in this approach), or between vocational and academic students (since only vocational students are affected by these changes). It is relatively simple for recalcitrant vocational teachers to relabel some of what they have always taught as basic skills and to let it go at that. This approach leaves the academic and general tracks alone, as well as the career guidance and counseling function of the high school, which affects all students' vocational deliberations. Compared to other models that follow, then, it can remedy only some of the ills resulting from the division between vocational and academic education." (pp. 24-25)