Families need choices, not punishments.
In the spring of 2019, HuffPost ran an in-depth story on the human costs of Kamala Harris’s war on truancy. It described how Harris had cracked down on truancy when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and later as California’s attorney general. Her efforts were ruining lives. When she took her post as the state’s top “progressive prosecutor” in 2011, Harris vowed that parents would “face the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed too many days of school. They soon felt that force. Numerous parents were handcuffed in front of their children and hauled off to jail for violating compulsory school attendance laws. One of the parents arrested under Harris’s watch was Cheree Peoples, whose 11-year-old daughter struggled with painful sickle cell disease and had reportedly missed 20 days of school.
Soon after the HuffPost exposé appeared, I wrote about how compulsory schooling laws aren’t progressive—they’re inhumane. It is one of several FEE articles I have written on this topic since 2017, because repealing compulsory school attendance laws is a fundamental pathway toward removing the coercive underpinnings of American K-12 education. This week at the annual FreedomFest conference, I am presenting on a panel about ending these laws.
It’s good timing. Last week, Politico reported that “California lawmakers are quietly advancing a bill that would undo controversial anti-truancy legislation Kamala Harris pushed more than a decade ago.” While the proposed California bill doesn’t seek to abolish compulsory school attendance, it is a step in the right direction. This legislative action should be applauded, and more states should follow California’s lead by loosening—and ideally eliminating—compulsory school attendance laws.
When my home state of Massachusetts became the first to enact a compulsory school attendance law in May 1852, it set a troubling precedent. For the first time, parents were compelled to send their children to school under a legal threat of force. Indeed, that was the intent. Six months before that law was passed, William Swan, editor of The Massachusetts Teacher, clearly stated the purpose of this compulsion:
In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. If left to their direction the young will be brought up in idle, dissolute, vagrant habits, which will make them worse members of society than their parents are… Nothing can operate effectually here but stringent legislation, thoroughly carried out by an efficient police; the children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.
The mid-19th century was a time of massive immigration into Boston, primarily of Irish Catholics who threatened the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural norms of the time. Compulsory school attendance laws were used as a coercive tactic to mold these newcomers. Not surprisingly, and largely by design, it was the poor and downtrodden who experienced the brunt of these laws, while parents like Horace Mann, the architect of the Massachusetts “common school” movement, homeschooled his own children even as he mandated forced schooling for others.
Today, it is still the poor and disadvantaged who bear the brunt of compulsory school attendance laws, which spread to all US states by the early 20th century. In 2023, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a high‐profile case involving two separate single moms who were sentenced to jail because their elementary‐age children each missed approximately fifteen days of school during the 2021–22 academic year.
And just three weeks ago, a Florida judge sentenced two parents to jail for not sending their kids to school.
These laws have got to go. If schools are desirable places to grow and to learn, then families and students will happily flock to them, as they do to the schools and spaces featured in my new book, Joyful Learning. The breathtaking expansion of school-choice programs across the US, which enable a portion of education funding to follow students to their preferred educational environment, can help to increase the variety of learning options available to families, helping them to find a desirable fit.
The current “chronic absenteeism” epidemic in schools across the country, typically defined as students missing at least 10% of schooldays, is a sign that forced schooling isn’t desirable for many students and their families. The solution isn’t to prosecute parents or threaten students with disciplinary action. The solution is to reduce compulsion, expand choice, and encourage entrepreneurial parents and teachers to launch new and better schools that students and parents want.
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