As we approach the twenty-first century, innovative approaches to preparing young people for adult life are much more urgent than ever. The global marketplace and the telecommunications revolution are spurring increasing interdependence among nations, as well as demanding the exchange of ideas and experiences about crucial human investment strategies among countries. These changing circumstances present vast challenges to national capacities for adaptation as each country searches for ways to produce well-educated, healthy, and productive youth. The European countries and the United States share common interests: How can our different educational systems attempt to meet the developmental needs of young adolescents, and how can these systems – curricula, instructional approaches, school organization – better prepare adolescents for adult life than they are now doing?

In the early 1980s, A Nation at Risk stimulated yet another wave of educational reform in the United States. In 1989, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, an operating program of Carnegie Corporation of New York, issued Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, a wide-ranging examination of the educational experiences of 10- to 15-year-old American adolescents. This report led to a Carnegie Corporation-sponsored Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative that has supported the reform of middle grades education in at least 15 states. International studies of education and health are also recently available, most noteworthy being the current activity around the Third International Study of Educational Achievement, to be released in the fall of 1996, and related multinational studies, such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has become more active in the education area as well.