ABSTRACT
The independent academy left many historical legacies. As institutions, academies established an infrastructure of capital assets and political and financial support for higher schooling that continues to live on in public schools as well as in alternatives to the public system. As sites of cultural production and reproduction, academies gave expression to cultures of community boosterism, class identity, and missionary zeal as well as to cultures of ethnic and religious pride and resistance. Finally, as historical precedents, academies provide a body of evidence for considering a number of ongoing policy issues in education, including charter school and school choice policies, as well as broader issues of community-based schooling, teacher autonomy, school funding, local control, and church and state. In this chapter we examine each of these three sets of historical legacies in tum: (1) institutional legacies, (2) cultural legacies, and (3) policy legacies.
