The educational attainment literature has brought back interest in early American primary schools, and much current research views those schools as superior to their European peers in the education offered to youth. Its emphasis, though, on using school enrollment as the prime indicator of attainment conflicts with the revisionist view of a previous generation of historians who argued that education in the heavily rural and agricultural society of the time should be considered as a process of social reproduction delivered by households, with schools being peripheral for most youth. This article, relying on evidence from statutes, indentures, and a 1798 New York State school survey, finds increased resort to primary schooling over the eighteenth century, attributable not to American exceptionalism but to a transatlantic movement away from scribal-dominated literacy and numeracy toward common use of a standardized written vernacular and “arithmetic by pen.” However, the dependence of households on child labor meant that the Three Rs did not get distributed in either an egalitarian or compact fashion. Small doses spread over a number of years—educational sprawl—best describes the system, and it lasted through much of the nineteenth century.

This article presents reflections from 12 experts on language learners strategy (LLS) research. They were asked to offer their reflections in one of their domains of expertise, linking research into LLS with successful language learning and use practices. In essence, they were called upon to provide a review of recent scholarship by identifying areas where results of research had already led to the enhancement of learner strategy use, as well as to describe ongoing and future research efforts intended to enhance the strategy domain. The LLS areas dealt with include theory building, the dynamics of delivering strategy instruction (SI), meta-analyses of SI, learner diversity, SI for young language learners, SI for fine-tuning the comprehension and production of academic-level, grammar strategies at the macro and micro levels, lessons learned from many years of LLS research in Greece, the past and future roles of technology aimed at enhancing language learning, and applications of LLS in content instruction. This review is intended to provide the field with an updated statement as to where we have been, where we are now, and where we need to go. Ideally, it will provide ideas for future studies.

John Flowerdew is a Visiting Chair at the University of Lancaster and a Visiting Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He was previously a Professor at City University of Hong Kong and at the University of Leeds, UK. His research is in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. His books include Academic listening: Research perspectives (CUP); Research perspectives on English for academic purposes (with M. Peacock) (CUP); Second language listening: Theory and practice (with L. Miller) (CUP); Academic discourse (Longman); Discourse in English language education (Routledge); Signalling nouns in discourse: A corpus-based discourse approach (with R. W. Forest) (CUP); Discourse in context (Bloomsbury); The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (with J. Richardson); Discipline-specific writing: Theory into practice (with T. Costley) (Routledge), and Introducing English for research publication purposes (with P. Habibie (Routledge).

This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation, highlighting the extension of counseling services and psychological vocabulary that affected evaluations of nervousness; the impact of negative developments like crime rates and growing family instability; and the results both of changes in educational patterns—such as more frequent examinations—and significant shifts in student goals and expectations. Finally, the article touches on efforts to mitigate anxiety, such as expanding student services, and also their limited impact.

Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to place, the knowledge that schools impart, and the hobbling of brown and Black children. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

This article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of “innovation” at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental Office of Innovative Programs, the WPCFS stood at the crossroads of conflicting imperatives for “innovation.” These included: (1) institutional interests in advancing “humanizing” pedagogy; (2) Black activists’ interests in operating a community-controlled school for students of color in West Philadelphia; and (3) teachers’ interests in balancing their commitments to “humanizing” instruction and a surrounding community with different educational priorities. We highlight two instances where the frictions between these uses of “innovation” became pronounced in the WPCFS—debates over “free time” and the 1973 teachers’ strike. These incidents clarify how the burden of reconciling opposing innovations fell unevenly on the teachers and community members—often in ways that pitted the groups against one another—and exacerbated raced and classed inequalities in the school and district. While the account focuses on the 1960–1970s, we suggest that the WPCFS is relevant for us today, offering insights for the present into the longer discursive history of “innovation” as a lever for school reform, and into its impacts on educational equity.

Cold War strategic priorities led the United States to establish an enduring military alliance with General Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain between 1953 and 1975. This article examines the educational diplomacy carried out by the US government during the 1960s and early 1970s to foster Spain's stable modernization through the training of national development elites and the dissemination of US educational ideas. The work surveys US educational, informational, and cultural programs aimed at shaping an educational framework conducive to the expansion and legitimization of a US-oriented socioeconomic liberalization in Spain. On the one hand, this US soft power strategy sought to attract those groups who could play an important role in the capitalist modernization of the educational and economic structures of the Iberian country. On the other hand, it sought to reduce the identification of the United States with Franco's dictatorship and to link the image of the American superpower to the hopes for progress of the Spanish people. All of this was pursued in order to preserve US defensive interests in Spain. The piece also discusses US assistance to the crucial 1970 Spanish General Education Law, which allows us to explore how the US ideology of development and education was received by Spanish educational audiences. Thus, by delving deeper into the intersection between cultural diplomacy, international development, and the history of education, we aim to contribute to the integration of education into the histories of modernization and to deepen our understanding of US educational foreign policy in the Cold War.