When was mandatory schooling

This creates a very interesting challenge for policymakers to change how early leavers value the options they face. A behavioral approach to encouraging participation may be more successful. For example, recent US research uses an experimental design to examine the impact of assistance on addressing the complexity of the financial aid process for college applications.

In the spirit of this research on the behavioral economics of education, compulsory schooling laws serve as a means to set and alter the expectations of students. Inequity across the socio-economic gradient in key outcomes for children—including educational attainment—is the focus of considerable policy attention.

While the intergenerational relationship between children and their parents is well-known, establishing the causal links is important for targeting policy recommendations. The implication is that the increase in parental schooling has a positive impact on parental earnings, which feeds through to their children's schooling attainment via better schools, better home environments, and so on.

Given an average gap in education between dropouts and non-dropouts of up to two years, this translates into an increase of approximately 0. Based on US Census data and state-by-state variation in compulsory schooling laws and their changes, one study examines the role of the change in parental education on their children's tendency to repeat high school grades.

This basic result is robust across other specifications and schooling measures such as dropout rates [9]. Despite the widely observed correlation between better health including specific biomarkers such as those for heart disease or diabetes and more education, the causal nature of this relationship is harder to pin down. For this reason, the exogenous change from a compulsory schooling law can provide useful evidence on the health and education relationship. Based on an analysis of compulsory schooling changes in seven European countries Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands , one additional year of schooling decreases the probability of self-reported poor health by about 5 percentage points for men, and by between 4 and 6.

Using various UK data sets, one study finds quite modest returns to actual physiological measures of health outcomes such as blood pressure , mortality rates, as well as self-reported health outcomes and health behaviors.

The authors suggest that the additional schooling may come too early to have a lasting impact on health choices and outcomes, making the causal relationship impossible to determine [10]. This is consistent with the view that reforms which happened in the early part of the century had a larger effect on health outcomes such as mortality because they reduced the likelihood that children would be employed in physically intensive employment, which would lead to poor physical health later in life.

A related—but contrasting—interpretation drawing on the early education investment literature is that the change in schooling actually comes too late. Overall there appears to be weak evidence to motivate a policy such as compulsory schooling on the grounds of a lasting physical health impact.

A somewhat different but related outcome is mental health. Research based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe SHARE database of older adults in Europe, and the same country reforms discussed in [2] , examines the impact of compulsory schooling on depression and cognition as measured by a word recall test. The additional schooling reduces the probability of suffering depression by 6. These findings support earlier work on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing ELSA which shows a positive and significant causal effect on old-age memory of less-educated people based on the impact of the UK reforms.

A promising related strand of research uses compulsory schooling to identify the role education plays in key cognitive choices. However, it also has a significant impact on financial decisions—improving financial literacy. More-educated individuals have fewer financial complications, higher credit scores, and lower probability of mortgage re-financing. The probability of having any retirement income rises by 5. Interestingly, these results control for whether or not the student has studied financial literacy at school through courses in personal finance, but this additional training does not have a significant impact on financial decision making.

In another application, compulsory schooling changes provide a potential identification strategy to examine how education and crime are related. A number of channels exist for education to influence crime outcomes. For instance, increased earnings raise the opportunity costs of illegal behavior. Education may also limit the time available for criminal activity. Finally, harking back to the earlier discussion on discount rates or time preferences , more-educated individuals may value the future more than the present, and may be more risk averse—neither of which are associated with criminal behavior.

In many of the health focused studies, the data do not give clear evidence on the transmission mechanism for these effects. The examination of an aged-population cohort is limiting of itself although ongoing work which links data sets like ELSA to administrative records will open up new opportunities for analysis. The Mongol Empire. The Most and Least Religious Countries. FEN Learning is part of Sandbox Networks, a digital learning company that operates education services and products for the 21st century.

While other disciplines have recognised periods of American history where the schooling system has been used to inculcate values among the foreign born Tyack, , 4 our analysis contributes to the literature by showing nation-building motives drove the passage of compulsory schooling laws from the s onwards, the first pillar of the Americanisation Movement, and the legislative bedrock on which later developments of the American education system have been built.

Most broadly, we contribute to the literature linking the national origins of migrants and institutional change. The seminal work of Acemoglu et al. The article is organised as follows. Section 1 presents qualitative evidence on the use of compulsory schooling as a nation-building tool during the Age of Mass Migration.

Section 2 develops a conceptual framework describing how compulsory schooling can be used to nation-build by homogenising civic values between its native and immigrant members. Section 3 describes the state level data and newly assembled database of compulsory state education laws by European country.

Section 4 presents evidence linking the composition of migrant groups and the cross-state passage of compulsory schooling. Section 5 develops and tests a model of schooling provision to estimate the relative demand for American common schools across migrant groups using county data. Section 6 concludes. The online Appendix A provides proofs, data sources and robustness checks. The American society used compulsory schooling as a tool to nation-building during the Age of Mass Migration has been recognised in leading accounts of the development of the American schooling system written by educationalists Cubberley, , sociologists Meyer et al.

We highlight those pieces of qualitative evidence that inform our research design. We review how long-standing concerns over migrants' assimilation informed political debate, and how the education system was viewed as the key policy tool to address such concerns.

This was driven by the view that exposure to American common schools would instil the desired civic values and discipline among migrants, and a recognition that such values could then be transmitted from children to parents.

We then provide evidence that nation-building motives informed the architects of the common school movement, both as a general principle to instil civic values among American-born children and to foster the discipline and assimilation of migrant children. We conclude by providing evidence of curricula in common schools, as this relates directly to the inculcation of civic values. American society's anxieties over immigrant assimilation have been well documented for each wave of large-scale migration.

The concerns of the American-born over migrants' assimilation are crystallised in the Dillingham Report, widely regarded as the most comprehensive legislative study on immigration ever conducted.

The Report was drafted over —11 by a Commission of senators, members of the House of Representatives and Presidential appointees. The Commission was established in response to concerns over the assimilation of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and produced a volume report, including a number of volumes solely dedicated to the role of the education system in the assimilation process.

The Commission repeatedly highlighted the importance of Americanising immigrants. Moreover, as the children grow older and become wage earners, they usually enter some higher occupation than that of their fathers, and in such cases the Americanising influence upon their parents continues until frequently the whole family is gradually led away from the old surroundings and old standards into those more nearly American.

The key individuals driving the American common school movement were Horace Mann — , Henry Barnard — and Calvin Stowe — Horace Mann is widely regarded as the most prominent figure of the common school movement, becoming the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in the earliest adopter of compulsory schooling. Like many advocates for the common school movement, he recurrently emphasised the link between education and the civic virtues necessary for effective participation in a democracy.

Henry Barnard was the secretary of the Connecticut Board of Education, and was very much influenced by what he had seen of the European education system, in its drive to instil civic values among European populations. Finally, Calvin Stowe was a key driver of the common school movement in the Midwest.

Stowe, like Mann, believed moral education was the most important aspect of schooling and was also heavily influenced by what he saw of European education practices, and compulsory schooling being used to inculcate civic values. It has been argued that all these central figures ultimately saw schools as the key tool for social control and assimilation in America. Certainly, advocates of common schools came to emphasise their role as an alternative to families to foster the assimilation of immigrant children.

As Tyack , p. One of the most noted advocates for common schools in Philadelphia was E. Are these persons fit depositaries of political power? American educators wanted their schooling system to place relatively more emphasis on the role of schooling in shaping the character, values and loyalties or discipline of students as future participants in political and social life.

This philosophy is what would have driven the civic values instilled into American-born children voluntarily attending schools in such high numbers Figure 1 and would drive some of the legislative acts that introduced compulsory schooling, to also make explicit references to civic values. This has led to considerable heterogeneity in practices, making it almost impossible to track curriculum changes over time by district Goldin, a. Subject to this caveat, we highlight the following.

First, the alternative source of education to common schools was parochial and private schools. In some cases, compulsory schooling laws required children to be taught in some public school. For instance, the standards set in Illinois and Wisconsin aroused fierce opposition because of their provisions that private schools teach in the English language and that they be approved by boards of public education Tyack, Second, states differed as to whether English should be the main language of instruction.

Some states imposed clear English language requirements early on, while in others bilingualism was first accepted and then banned from public schools.

This was ultimately followed by the introduction of citizenship classes targeted to the foreign born adults from to onwards, that were in part conducted by the US Bureau of Naturalization Cubberley, In short, it is not that nation-building efforts ignored adult immigrants. Rather, as recognised by the Dillingham Report, policies to target immigrant children were prioritised and attempted earlier. To bridge the qualitative and quantitative evidence, we present a framework to make precise the idea of how a society made up of native and migrant groups, with heterogeneity in values across groups, can use compulsory schooling to nation-build.

The framework is closely based on Alesina and Reich Consider a state comprised of the following: American-born individuals, normalised to mass 1; and. To see how schooling might affect the homogeneity of values in society, assume first that a voluntary schooling system is in place, attended by the American-born as described in Figure 1. We assume the school curriculum matches the values of the median American, i m. Schooling can impact a variety of specific values Lott, ; Glaeser et al.

The population decides by majority rule whether to make this schooling system compulsory. Assuming a fixed cost of implementing and enforcing compulsory schooling, the policy increases the tax burden for all by an amount T. Proposition 1. The proof is in online Appendix A. Section 4 takes this to the data to explain the cross-state timing of compulsory schooling in US states. A necessary condition for natives to prefer to make schooling compulsory is because it binds on immigrants and so exposes them to American civic values.

This is at the heart of the analysis in Section 5 that estimates the relative demand for American common schooling among immigrants and natives.

The top half of Figure 2 shows the variation we need to explain: the timing of compulsory schooling laws by the US state, as coded in Landes and Solomon This coding is our preferred source because it covers all states from the s.

A prominent alternative coding is that provided by Goldin and Katz who extend the coding of Lleras-Muney, The Goldin and Katz data only covers the period from onwards, and so does not provide information on the 33 states that introduced compulsory schooling before For the 15 states covered by both the Landes and Solomon and Goldin and Katz codings, we find the year of passage for compulsory schooling is identical for 13 states, and the differences are minor in the other two cases Louisiana: versus ; Tennessee: versus We focus on determining what drove the adoption of compulsory schooling across states.

It is well understood that such laws were initially imperfectly enforced, but became more effective over time Clay et al. The existing literature has focused on measuring the impacts of this legislation on various outcomes: a question for which the enforcement of compulsory schooling is more first order. Obviously, no data set is ever likely to contain information on the actual values held by the American-born and migrants, by country of origin. We therefore seek an empirical proxy for the values held by migrants.

Given the multidisciplinary body of work documenting nation-building motives for the development of compulsory state education systems in Europe Weber, ; Holmes, ; Ramirez and Boli, ; Aghion et al. Our approach thus provides a natural distinction between two types of European migrant: Europeans from countries that had compulsory state schooling laws in place before the first US state Massachusetts in and were thus more likely to be exposed to such civic values in their country of origin, and European migrants from countries that introduced compulsory state schooling after and were thus less likely to have been inculcated in civic values or discipline, that might have been held and valued in American society at the time.

To reiterate, the exact way in which compulsory state schooling operated would likely differ between each European country. We do not have data on the content of school curricula in Europe, so are unable to exploit any such variation. We leave for future research any attempt to code the specific civic values promoted under each schooling system, but what we want to emphasise here is that, relative to a church or family-based schooling, state education systems generally instil values or discipline more in line with: underpinning democratic institutions Glaeser et al.

For the purpose of this article, we have constructed a novel data set on the timing of compulsory state schooling laws by European country, shown in the bottom half of Figure 2. Online Appendix A details the data sources underlying this coding.

The adoption of compulsory schooling in Europe is not perfectly predicted by geography, language or religion. In particular, within each group of European countries that adopted compulsory schooling pre and post , there are countries in Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe, and countries where the main religion is Catholicism or Protestantism.

This variation enables us to separately identify the impact on the cross-state passage of compulsory schooling of within-migrant diversity in civic values from differences along with other dimensions, such as European region of origin, language and religion. For our main analysis, we focus on the dates shown in Figure 2.

We later provide robustness checks on our results using these lower and upper bound dates of compulsory schooling. Finally, Table A3 probes the link between compulsory schooling laws and school enrolment rates in Europe, exploiting five secondary data sources. Nevertheless, in each data set, we compare: enrolment rates between countries with and without compulsion in , in years prior to and including columns 1 and 2 ; and. Despite these sources differing in their coverage of countries, years, and enrolment measures, we see a consistent pattern of results from both comparisons that show: European countries with compulsion in place in have higher enrolment rates than countries without compulsion; and.

These secondary data sources support the hypothesis that migrants from countries with compulsory state-provided education are more likely to have been instilled with the kinds of civic values related to democracy or social stability, than children from countries where education would have been provided by non-state actors: private schools, religious schools or households themselves. Whether these differences in values then translate to differences in values held by Europeans that migrated to the US depends on the nature of migrant selection.

The evidence on the selection of migrants based on their human capital, during the Age of Mass Migration, has produced mixed findings on how selection differs across country or origin, and over time. For example, Abramitzky et al. Abramitzky et al. In relation to the differential selection of migrants into the US, they report large differences earnings gaps between countries.

For example, Norwegian migrants had among the most negative earnings gap at the time of arrival in line with Abramitzky et al. Negative earnings gaps are also found for migrants from Portugal, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden. Positive earnings gaps at time of arrival are documented for British migrants, and those from France and Russia.

Earnings gaps differences were close to zero for migrants from Italy and Germany. Wegge presents estimates for Germany. Comparing migration rates across occupation groups for over 10, individuals who migrated mostly to the US between and She finds that members of the richest and poorest occupations were least likely to migrate, while workers in the mid-skill range, such as machinists, metal workers and brewers, were most likely to do so, that is in line with results reported above of Abramitzky et al.

Our central idea is that European migrants are selected in terms of their civic values or discipline. As these are instilled by state education systems, if migrants are positively selected, the American median voter should target compulsory schooling in US states towards Europeans from countries without exposure to compulsory schooling at home, as we have emphasised throughout.

Of course, if European migrants are negatively selected in terms of their civic values, then American voters should instead target compulsory schooling laws towards those with exposure to compulsory schooling at home. Hence the nature of migrant selection remains an entirely empirical question that we determine below.

We combine US census data on state population by country of birth with our coding on the timing of compulsory schooling law by European country to compute for each US state-year, the respective population shares of migrants from European countries with and without compulsory schooling before Data limitations prevent us from dividing non-European migrants between those with and without compulsory schooling at home: they are grouped in one category throughout.

Figure A2 shows the share of the state population in each group Europeans with and without compulsory state schooling in their country of origin, and non-Europeans , averaged across census years before the passage of compulsory schooling laws in each state. There is considerable variation in the size of the groups across states: the share of Europeans with compulsory schooling ranges from 0.

Most importantly, the correlation between the migrant shares are positive but not high, allowing us to separately identify the public policy response of American-born median voters to the presence of each group.

Table 1 compares the characteristics of the different migrant groups and Americans in state-census years before compulsory schooling is introduced. The first row describes the relative population share of each group and again highlights the considerable variation in these shares across US states in a given year, and the variation in shares within a state over time.

The next two rows in panel a highlight differences in human capital across groups. Among adults, the share of illiterates is significantly higher among Europeans from countries without compulsory schooling than among European-born adults from countries with compulsory schooling.

The next row in Table 1 shows that comparing enrolment rates in any type of school in the US public or parochial for children aged 8—14 in each group the cohort for whom compulsory schooling was typically related to , these are significantly higher among migrants groups from European countries without compulsory schooling than for children from European countries with compulsory schooling in place by As expected, in terms of enrolment levels in the US, both migrant groups trail behind the enrolment rates of American-born individuals, and enrolment rates of non-Europeans lie somewhere between the levels of the two European groups.

In panel a , the unit of observation is the state-census year. For each state, the sample period starts from and covers all census years prior to the introduction of compulsory schooling laws. The year of passage of compulsory school attendance laws is extracted from Landes and Solomon In panel b , the unit of observation is the county in County populations are measured in shares.

For both panels, in column 1 , the American-born individuals are those whose recorded nativity is native born. In column 2 , the European countries defined to have had compulsory schooling laws in place in are Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Norway, Portugal and Sweden. All other European countries are included in column 3.

In the first row, populations are measured in 10,s. Adults are defined to be aged 15 and above when defining the share of adults that are illiterate, and enrolment rates for 8—14 year olds are the share of this group that report being in school. The occupational score is a constructed variable from IPUMS-USA that assigns each occupation in all years a value representing the median total income in hundreds of dollars of all persons with that particular occupation in The occupational score thus provides a continuous measure of occupations, according to the economic rewards enjoyed by people working at them in Column 5 reports the p-value on a test of the null hypothesis that the values in columns 2 and 3 are equal — this is derived from an OLS regression allowing standard errors to be clustered by region.

Column 6 reports the p-value on the same test where we additionally control for state fixed effects. In columns 5 and 6 , p-values on t-tests are reported in brackets.

This suggests compulsory schooling laws might have been passed by US states to raise the skills of migrant children, rather than to instil civic values that could only be acquired through compulsion to attend a common school or requiring other schools to teach elements of the same curriculum. We disentangle these explanations by exploiting variation in enrolment rates within each European group, to see if enrolment rates per se drive the passage of compulsion, that would follow from the skills-based rather than values-based nation-building explanation.

The remaining rows of panel a highlight that the two groups of European migrants do not significantly differ from each other on other characteristics including the share of young people in the group aged 15 or less , labour force participation rates, the share of the group residing on a farm, and an overall measure of the groups economic standing in the US as proxied by an occupational index score available across US census years.

The maintained hypothesis is that this only picks up differential selection of migrants based on their civic values. We address two broad classes of econometric concern that the measure picks up alternative selection of migrants.

In the first, we use multiple strategies to address the issue that the process driving the endogenous location choices of migrants differs between groups subsection 4. In the second, we address the concern this measure relates to other migrant characteristics by testing whether other forms of within-migrant diversity such as language and religion correlate to the passage of compulsory school laws subsection 4. Table 2 presents our baseline results. Column 2 splits the foreign-born individuals into European and non-Europeans, and the result suggests the presence of European migrants is significantly associated with the passage of compulsory schooling.

A non-parametric Cox proportional hazard model is estimated, where hazard rates are reported. Hence tests for significance relate to the null that the coefficient is equal to one. The unit of observation is the state-census year, for all census years from A state drops from the sample once compulsory schooling is passed.

In all columns population share groupings are defined in effect sizes, where this is calculated using population shares from census-years prior to the introduction of compulsory schooling law.

Robust standard errors are reported. In column 4 we control for the following characteristics of each group American-born, non-European, European with and without compulsory schooling laws in : the share aged 0—15, the share of adults aged 15 and over that are illiterate, the labour force participation rate, and the share residing on a farm.

We also control for the following state characteristics: the total population and the average occupational score of the population. We also control for the enrolment rate of 8—14 year olds among American-borns in effect sizes , and group specific enrolment rates in US schools for all European and non-European groups in the state in effect sizes.

At the foot of column 3 onwards we report the p-value on the null hypothesis that the hazard coefficients are the same for the two European groups, and the p-value that the hazard coefficients are the same for the non-European immigrant groups and the European born from countries that did not have compulsory schooling in place in While similar results have been noted in the earlier literature studying the passage of compulsory schooling laws, column 3 splits European migrants along the key margin relevant for the nation-building hypothesis.

In contrast, the presence of Europeans with a long history of compulsory schooling at home does not influence the situation when compulsory schooling is passed by states. Two key results emerge. The magnitude of the effect remains large: a one standard deviation increase in the population share of Europeans without compulsory state schooling at home doubles the hazard of a US state passing compulsory schooling.

Second, enrolment rates of migrants' children in the US have weak impacts on whether American-born voters introduce compulsory schooling. We note that higher enrolment rates among the children of natives speed up the adoption of the laws, as shown first by Landes and Solomon This might reflect the natural complementarity between American enrolment rates, namely, the extent to which American children are instilled in certain civic values in school will inevitably increase the returns to also instil the same values in migrant children using the same common schools.

To further document the link between compulsory schooling and the human capital of adult migrants, Table A4 reports the full set of human capital related coefficients from the full specification in column 4 of Table 2 , where all covariates are measured in effect sizes. This highlights that higher illiteracy rates among adults in each group are not associated with the earlier passage of compulsory schooling.

Indeed, states with less literate adult populations of the American-born and Europeans with exposure to state compulsory state education systems in their country of origin, adopt compulsory schooling significantly later in time, all else equal.

This runs counter to the idea that the cross-state passage of compulsory schooling was driven predominantly by a desire by American-born individuals to skill the migrant population. The nation-building explanation thus remains first order: the conceptual framework highlighted that the American-born individuals have a desire to homogenise those migrants who are more distant from them in values or discipline, and the empirical evidence suggests it is the civic values held by migrants, as proxied by their historic exposure to compulsory state-provided education systems at home, rather than migrants' investment in the human capital of their children in the US, or the skills among adults, that largely drives the cross-state passage of compulsory schooling.

Of course, the American median voter could have targeted those with compulsory schooling in their country of origin because either: state education systems inculcate country-specific identities that are not transportable across locations, and so those individuals are most in need of being re-indoctrinated with American values; or. The Puritan notion of education as a moral, social obligation was thus given the sanction of law, a pattern later followed by nineteenth century crusaders for free public education.

By , all states had passed school attendance legislation, although until the s, many were unsuccessful in enforcing their compulsory schooling laws. However, as the population increased, and as the demand for well-trained labor grew, the bureaucratic machinery for enforcement was created.