Recent educational reforms have revitalized comprehensive high schools as a pivotal approach to integrate vocational and academic pathways, alleviate streaming anxieties, and foster balanced educational development. As an institutional model in secondary education, comprehensive high schools exhibit significant cross-national commonality in their design logic and influencing factors. Through a historical institutionalism analysis of America’s century-long experience, three developmental phases emerge: institutional formation during the single-track versus dual-track debate, reform driven by scientific-technological advancement, and the contemporary trend toward academic intensification with concomitant curricular contraction. The evolutionary dynamics reveal a dialectical relationship between social consciousness and material conditions, exposing inherent tensions between the idealized comprehensive model and competitive societal structures. Three constitutive factors—societal institutions, economic paradigms, and educational functions—form the theoretical framework for analyzing institutional logic. China’s post-reform comprehensive high school initiatives operate within the paradigm of “industrialization,educational choice,and equity,” yet confront institutional misalignments or lack of supporting institutions. Consequently, policymakers must reconcile top-level designs with societal expectations while strategically positioning secondary vocational education as the anchor for effective vocational-academic integration.