Female Students and Denominational Affiliation: Sources of Success and Variation among NineteenthCentury Academies

Academies were the dominant form of schooling beyond the primary level through most of the nineteenth century. They have not received much scholarly attention, however, because their great heterogeneity and eclecticism make them difficult to categorize and describe. This article addresses these problems by making the very heterogeneity of academies a subject of investigation. Using data on overall norms and trends among academies as points of comparison, this article focuses on the most successful academies operating in the New York Regents system of academies during the height of the academy era. It then identifies the institutional characteristics and strategic choices that contributed to that success. In the process the article suggests some frameworks for investigating broader patterns of variation among nineteenth-century academies. It also raises some questions about the implications of this analysis for considering more recent proposals for market-based models of school funding.