After watching Fantastic Beasts, I've grown curious about the education of the kids that lived under Mary Lou Barebone's roof. Although the films are fiction, I would still like to have an idea of how the education system worked and was approached during that time, especially for the state of New York. While I know that there wasn't a high attendance rate during this time due to various reasons based on my findings, I thought it would be fun to know and get a better understanding for education during this period.
In addition to knowing the year education became compulsory in the state, I'd also like to know the ages in which students were mandated to go. I've found a lot of history regarding Massachusettes becoming a compulsory education state, and its roots in how it already had that when it was a colony, in addition to ages to attend school and requirements for the education. I also learned that education became mandatory countrywide in 1918
tl;dr:
Thank you in advance!
It's not hyperbole to say there's always been a bit of a horse race between Massachusetts and New York State when it comes to education. It's true that Massachusetts can lay claim to the first compulsory education law (known as "The Old Deluder Satan Law" in 1647, mostly about ensuring children could read enough scripture to keep the Son of Perdition at bay.) They can also claim the oldest high school (Boston Latin, founded in 1635) and the oldest college (Harvard, founded 1650) but New York was the first state to get their act together on a systematic level.
In 1787, the New York State legislature convened the first Board of Regents. The idea was that a group of learned men would "consider" education for the state's citizens and future citizens. Their first charge was overseeing King's College (better known as Columbia) and included a who's who of Founders with New York connections, including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and George Clinton. However, they didn't actually do a whole lot as they were more likely to fail to meet a quorum on the scheduled meeting dates than to actually decide anything. Many of the men (all white) on the Board were advocates of taxpayer funded education for younger children and used their position to push for "common" schools. Although Horace Mann, the Secretary of Education of Massachusetts Board of Education (founded in 1837), would become the loudest and most famous advocate of the notion that the place known as "school" could, and should be, a universal experience for all of America's children (by which they meant white boys, sometimes white girls, occasionally free Black, African, or Indigenous children), New York State established a formal fund to support common schools in 1805.
So, basically, New York had the framework for public education about three decades before Massachusetts. Both states focused on the idea of population and town size. New York State's policy was if a town, or district, had more than a few children between the ages of 5 and 15, they were expected to build - and fund - a school. This meant that by 1850 or so, there were more than 10,000 school districts in the state, the overwhelming majority of which were one-room school houses serving children within a particular attendance area, usually walking distance. Because school taxes weren't strictly enforced, schools often depended on "rate bills" (aka tuition), which meant school wasn't available to the children of parents without access to disposable income. In 1851, the New York State legislature passed laws enforcing school taxes, and established a formal, taxpayer funded system of public education. This law was further refined in 1856, establishing the elected office of Commissioner of Schools for each Assembly district in the state. (Quick aside: the men elected as Commissioners were required to file reports and their annual reports provide historians of education with some of the richest and most compelling data about education of the era. The men were charged with inventorying textbooks, counting outhouses, and documenting salaries and student populations. They are the reason we known that women who taught summer session in NYS, mid-1800's, earned a salary that was 1/3 that of the men who taught winter sessions.)
The position of Superintendent of Public Instruction was created not long after and in 1894, the state Constitution was amended to include: "The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this State may be educated." That same year, the state adopted their first compulsory education law. Politicians were facing pressure related to child labor, perceptions of gangs of holligan children raising havoc in New York City streets, and a compulsion to do things before Massachusetts and so they passed a law that children aged 8- 12 were required to attend the full school year of 130 days. Children aged 13-14 that were employed had to attend at least 80 days. In 1896, the school year was extended to 160 days in 1896. In 1913, 180 became the magic number, and it hasn't changed since.^1
Compulsory education laws require that schools actually attend to the notion of truancy. Prior to the 1890's, a child not in school during the day would be unremarkable. As social pressure shifted between 1894 and the 1920's, a New York child not in school would catch the attention of a school official hired for the explicit purpose of looking for children not in school. Part of the compulsory education laws included the notion of state aid - that is, schools would get funding from the state based on student attendance. If students didn't attend, the school wouldn't get funding. Therefore, schools invested in a person whose job it was to ensure children attended school. Children were expected to attend from the age of 5 to 15(ish). (If a boy left school at 15 to work, or a girl left to get married, no one was particularly concerned. At the time.) The notion of "high school graduation" would become the norm by the 1940's or so (earlier in some regions of the state) and by the 1960's, virtually all of New York State teenagers would be familiar with the Regents exams; a series of exams administered by the Board of the Regents. Success on the Regents meant graduation and a high school diploma from a state that prided itself on the most rigorous graduation criteria in the country. Failure meant being labeled a "dropout."
This response, on the experiences of a Black, female teeenager in NYC who survivied polio may shed further light on the nature of NYS education. As does this response on the naming patterns in New York State schools.
A brief caveat regarding the notion of compulsory education: While it's true that all 50 states had established laws on the books stating children from the ages of 5ish to 16ish were expected to be in school 180-ish days a year, the reality was much less explicit. Some states in the mid-west had laws that were passed by one house of the state legislature, but not the other. Others passed a law but had zero intention of actually enforcing them. Others, mostly notably Mississippi, passed one but reversed it in the 1950's when it looked like Black children would be given access to white schools. In truth, American schools didn't become truly universal and compulsory+ until the passage of the The Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. (+Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1925 meant that parents could/can, according to state policy, provide education at home or a private school, and was/are under no compulsion to send their child to a public school.)