The educational excellence movement has made an academic curriculum a high priority for all high school students, including the 40 percent who do not go on to college. The joint efforts approach to incorporating basic skills into the vocational curriculum is based on the following assumptions: (1) academic skills are embedded in vocational education; (2) vocational tasks provide for realistic use of academic basic skills, and connecting academic learning with application strengthens students' basic skills; and (3) neither academic basic skills nor vocational skills should be taught in isolation from each other. Vocational and academic teachers who desire to develop an integrated and articulated program in which vocational students can receive instruction in the basic skills have three main options: sharing, teaming, and crossing over (from vocational to academic education or vice versa). Each of these options can be used in all types of programs, including traditional vocational programs, compensatory and support-oriented programs, and alternative programs such as those based on learning centers and laboratories. Student learning contracts, visiting consultants or specialists, cooperative programs, competency-based education, applied learning in a problem-solving mode, and Academic Development Plans (ADPs) are all effective in programs infusing academic instruction into the vocational curriculum. Like Individualized Education Plans, ADPs describe a student's present level of educational performance, state annual goals, and identify appropriate objective criteria, evaluation procedures, and schedules for determining whether or not these objectives are being achieved. (MN)