An Act Concerning the Attendance of Children at School

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An Act Concerning the Attendance of Children at School

Legislation

By: General Court of Massachusetts

Date: 1852

Source: An Act Concerning the Attendance of Children at School (1852).

About the Author: The General Court of Massachusetts is the name of the Massachusetts legislature. Founded in 1630 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony received its charter from England, the General Court created legislation and sat in judgment of certain cases as well. The General Court is composed of the Massachusetts Senate and the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

INTRODUCTION

Massachusetts created the first education law in the North American colonies. Enacted in 1642, it required parents and apprenticeship masters to teach children religious principles and the laws of the commonwealth. The law said nothing of schools or schooling in formal institutions; educating children was placed in the hands of parents and masters as a legal duty and requirement. Five years later Massachusetts passed the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1647 mandating that all towns of more than fifty families appoint a teacher to teach reading and writing to the children. The 1647 law also required all towns of more than 100 families to establish a grammar school to prepare students for university.

For the next 200 years education in the colonies and later the United States was a combination of teaching by parents, self-directed learning, private and public school attendance, overseas school attendance, and private tutoring. Literacy rates for all white men and women in the United States hovered around eighty percent in 1870, just as compulsory attendance laws began to pass throughout northern states. Literacy rates in the north were over ninety percent, but in the south the rates were only about fifty-five percent. Only five to eight percent of slaves and former slaves were literate.

Although the 1647 law did not make school attendance compulsory, it did establish the basis for later compulsory attendance laws. In 1852, Massachusetts was the first state to pass a law that required school attendance. New York enacted a similar compulsory attendance law in 1854.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives

Section 1. Every person who shall have any child under his control between the ages of eight and fourteen years, shall send such child to some public school within the town or city in which he resides, during at least twelve weeks, if the public schools within such town or city shall be so long kept, in each and every year during which such child shall be under his control, six weeks of which shall be consecutive.

Section 2. [Describes fine of $20 for truancy]

Section 3. It shall be the duty of the school committee in the several towns or cities to inquire into all cases of violation of the first section of this act, and to ascertain of the persons violating the same, the reasons, if any, for such violation and they shall report such cases, together with such reasons, if any, to the town or city in their annual report; but they shall not report any cases such as are provided for by the fourth section of this act.

Section 4. If, upon inquiry by the school committee, it shall appear, or if upon the trial of any complaint or indictment under this act it shall appear, that such child has attended some school, not in the town or city in which he resides, for the time required by this act, or has been otherwise furnished with the means of education for a like period of time, or has already acquired those branches of learning which are taught in common schools, [also describes physical incapacity or poverty as being valid excuses for absence from school] shall not be held to have violated the provisions of this act.

Section 5. It shall be the duty of the treasurer of the town or city to prosecute all violations of this act.

SIGNIFICANCE

By the mid–1900s all states had passed some form of compulsory attendance law for children, with some exceptions for minority children. The Massachusetts law required twelve weeks of schooling per year, six of which needed to be consecutive, for children ages eight to fourteen; the twelve week requirement has evolved, over time, to a thirty-six week requirement, and in Massachusetts in 2006 all children between the ages of six and sixteen were required to attend school.

Compulsory attendance laws, paired with child labor laws in the first three decades of the twentieth century, reduced the participation of children in the labor force while increasing literacy rates in the United States. Proponents of compulsory attendance laws pointed to the school's role as a social agent, taking the children of immigrants and poor children and promoting civic development and literacy. Social workers and Progressive Era reformers viewed the schools as agents for change. Education was considered the primary vehicle for lifting people out of poverty, and school officials and teachers could act as front-line monitors for children at risk.

Most states in the United States, as of 2005, require children ages six to sixteen to attend school. The age requirement begins at four-and-two-thirds years old in the District of Columbia, while in Pennsylvania and Washington state all children age eight and older must attend school. All other states fall between the two extremes. More than ninety-seven percent of all children ages six to sixteen attend school in the United States, with slightly less than two percent of all children homeschooled by parents.

When the current homeschooling trend began in the U.S. in the 1970s, compulsory attendance laws caused legal problems for parents who chose to home-school. In Massachusetts, the 1987 Supreme Judicial Court caseCare and Protection of Charlessets the standard for homeschooling for all districts, with a balance between parent choice and district demands required in each student's case. As of 2006, homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, and various court decisions and exceptions give homeschoolers a means to fulfill compulsory attendance laws—homeschooling is considered a form of school "attendance."

In most states, students can leave school at the age of sixteen, approximately two years before formal secondary education ends with graduation from the twelfth grade. In 1972, the dropout rate in the U.S. was fifteen percent, and it hit a historic low in 2003 at ten percent. Some states, such as Kansas, have seen dropout rates decline since raising the minimum dropout age to eighteen. Michigan was considering a similar increase in the compulsory attendance age as of 2006. Literacy rates in the United States are an estimated at eighty-six to ninety-five percent—one of the lowest rates among developed countries. Compulsory attendance, an important tool for social change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continues to play an important social and cultural role in the early twenty-first century.