Compulsory Attendance

Compulsory attendance is the common name for state legislation that requires children of specific ages to attend a school for a minimum amount of time or until some minimal level of education has been completed (e.g., completion of a common school education of eight grades). In the United States, the first state to compel school attendance was Massachusetts in 1852; the last state was Mississippi in 1918. Between the 1850s and the 1920s, compulsory attendance was promoted as a way to reform the common school system so as to achieve the ideal of universal education. By one measure it is an example of a successful school reform—schooling is virtually universal in the United States. Compulsory schooling, however, has not achieved the 19th-century ideal of a universally well-educated citizenry. Moreover, its reliance on state powers of coercion has provoked tremendous opposition, and such dissent has yet to abate.

Compulsory attendance laws are sometimes called compulsory school laws or compulsory education laws. These terms, however, can also refer to laws that prescribe (or proscribe) specific educational content as well as school attendance. In addition, the term compulsory education laws is regularly used by historians to refer to the type of laws that the New England colonies enacted in the 17th century to mandate some form of education but not necessarily formal schooling (e.g., the Massachusetts Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647).

By and large the enforcement of compulsory attendance laws had modest effects on increasing school enrollments. According to various historians of education, schooling was almost universal in several northern states before the enactment of such laws, and according to economists, the enforcement of such laws in the first half of the 20th century accounted for no more than 5% of the increase in school attendance. These laws did, however, have major effects on the norms of schooling in the United States and the relationships among parents, children, schools, and the state.