California’s Experience With Compulsory Education

It’s time to review our collective fascination with perpetuating mandatory government school attendance.

Since the beginning of statehood, Californians have pursued education at a steep cost to produce a free society in the frontier along the Pacific Ocean.

During the height of the Mexican–American War, women like Olive Mann Isbell established the first school in California at the Mission Santa Clara de Asis while bullets whirled over her head and the heads of the 200 children in her stewardship, according to the 2015 book “Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve Courageous Teachers and Their Deeds of Valor” by Terry Lee Marzell.

Isbell filled the roles of founder, principal, and teacher and valiantly provided the children an education and respite from the hostilities around them—not because the state required it, but because the children needed it. Her legacy challenges the narrative that only government can create schools and ensure children are educated.

Not long after, California’s founders included a bold declaration of faith in education with Article IX in the state’s new constitution. They wrote, “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement.”

This vision allowed churches and other charitable organizations to build our first “public” schools. In most communities, these schools were a true private-public partnership and were open to nearly everyone in the community, including those who couldn’t pay basic tuition.

California’s experiment with compulsory education began in 1874, when lawmakers mandated that children ages 8 to 14 attend school for at least 20 weeks each year. This marked a turning point, when education shifted from a family-led endeavor, often rooted in churches or local communities, to a state-controlled mandate. The delegates to the state’s second constitutional convention in 1879 tasked the legislature to “provide for a system of common schools by which a free school shall be kept up and supported in each district at least six months in every year.”

But as was demonstrated in the recent Vergara case, state-provided education is supposed to be free for every child in the state, but it’s not guaranteed to be a high-quality education according to the state’s highest court.

California’s compulsory education laws continued to expand without regard for its ability to provide an adequate education for every child. By 1903, the law covered more ages, and by 1961, it required all children ages 6 to 18 to attend school or face penalties. What started as a modest encouragement to keep children from being exploited as laborers became a legal obligation enforced by truancy officers, fines, and even jail time, effectively replacing parental discretion with government compulsion.

Somehow, the Greatest Generation, who saved Europe from communism, thought it wise to hand over their children to the state for six to eight hours a day, nine months a year, essentially complying with a government takeover of their boomer children. The doctrine of “in loco parentis,” meaning “in place of the parent,” has become more of a legal fact rather than an educational philosophy.

Education Begins in the Home

Looking at the status of our government-provided public schools now and the failure they’ve become for millions of students over the last few generations, it’s time to reconsider state laws that require or compel education at the threat of imprisonment. Putting aside the poor argument from government school boosters and teachers’ unions that parents are capable neither of educating their children nor of finding a suitable academic pathway for them, eliminating compulsory education laws does not mean that government warehouses for children will cease to exist; rather, it means that we’ll send fewer parents to court to justify their preference for not sending their children to schools that are dangerous and academic failures.

Even so, education has been understood over millennia as a responsibility primarily rooted in the home and supported by community institutions, chiefly, churches. Religious institutions had been the backbone of literacy and learning in California long before the first taxpayer-supported school was built. But as more taxpayer dollars were directed to education, political pressure mounted to limit faith-based instruction. The infamous Blaine Amendments—rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry—outlawed the use of public funds for religious schools, cutting churches out of education policy almost entirely.

This shift was paired with the creation of hundreds of new school districts across the state and, eventually, an expansive Education Code that is tens of thousands of pages long, designed not to guide but to control every aspect of education from preschool through adulthood.

The rise of compulsory education laws in the Progressive Era cemented this mindset. Under the belief that centralized planning could solve all of society’s ills, reformers insisted that every child be “systematized”—trained, measured, and molded by credentialed experts. Kerry McDonald of the Foundation for Economic Education has documented how this era marked a dramatic turning point: the moment when schooling stopped being a tool of empowerment and became a tool of control.

And what has this yielded? Not much good.

California School Rankings

Despite nearly universal attendance and a public school system that consumes more than 40 percent of California’s state budget, student outcomes are abysmal. Reading and math proficiency have flatlined—or declined. California ranks near the bottom nationally in literacy. Even before the pandemic shutdowns, more than half of our high schoolers couldn’t read or do math at grade level. Afterward, outcomes continued to decline.

The COVID-era school closures made it plain just how fragile the government school system really is. Under the pretense of “distance learning,” districts scrambled to cobble together Zoom classes and digital worksheets, efforts that failed to reach millions of students, especially those in working-class families. Bureaucrats kept schools shuttered for months, even years in some places, while private schools, homeschoolers, and even many charter schools adapted quickly and kept educating. It became painfully obvious that the state-run Luddite model could not pivot in a crisis, even with an army of Chromebooks and Zoom accounts. It was built for control and indoctrination, not flexibility, resilience, or instruction.

The broken promises of compulsory education have led many parents to opt out of the government-run system. Homeschooling numbers have surged. Microschools have become a thing. Private schools remain in high demand, even as tuition rises. Despite constant political attacks and threats of elimination by the teacher-controlled Legislature, charter schools are thriving as a middle ground between government control and parental choice.

The U.S. Supreme Court is even beginning to revisit the underpinnings of compulsory education. Just weeks ago, in its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the high court questioned whether the government has the constitutional authority to mandate education in only one model. Several justices expressed concern that compulsory attendance laws violate fundamental parental rights and fail to reflect the diversity of educational philosophies in modern America.

To quote from the opinion: “Parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation—enforceable by fine or imprisonment—to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute. And many parents cannot afford such a substitute.”

In California, children ages 6 to 18 must attend full-time school under section 48200 of the state’s Education Code. Parents can opt out only if their child attends a full-time private school (section 48222) or receives instruction from a credentialed tutor (section 48224). Otherwise, failure to comply triggers truancy laws (sections 48260–48293), and repeated violations can lead to fines or even jail time. In short, the state leaves little room for families to say “no” to its version of education.

Why can parents not afford alternative education options? Because government’s monopoly on public education makes it ridiculously expensive to overcome on account of required school days, hours of operation, and other antiquated requirements.

State-Sponsored Monopoly

The uncomfortable truth is this: We cannot fix a system that was built on faulty assumptions. We can’t reform our way out of a structure designed to limit choice, stifle innovation, and enforce one-size-fits-all solutions on millions of unique children.

Public schools may still play a role as a safety net for families who need them, but they should no longer operate as a state-sponsored monopoly. We don’t mandate that every family use a single government food line or shop at assigned state-run clothing stores. We let families decide what works best for them. Why should schooling be any different?

As the appetite for more control over our children has increased, but the value being offered has decreased commensurately, it’s time to review our collective fascination with perpetuating mandatory government school attendance.

Ending compulsory education doesn’t mean ending education. It means trusting families to take ownership of how, when, and where their children learn. It means giving parents—not bureaucrats—the final say. It means shifting from a top-down mandate to a bottom-up model of accountability, choice, and opportunity.

Some will argue this is radical. But what’s truly radical is continuing to force children into a system that fails them academically, socially, and morally while punishing families who dare to choose a different path. It’s not enough to offer alternatives at the margins. We must dismantle the assumption that the state knows best.

Returning to Isbell’s success as a renegade teacher is to be commended. The formalized education project that would eventually grow out of her and others’ efforts, mixed with a progressive Prussian model of putting children on a conveyor belt to produce efficient economic automatons, is understandable, but regrettable. It eventually led the way to a regime of compulsory education laws that have incrementally deprived parents of rights and responsibilities over their own children and have led to poor academic outcomes.

It’s time to end compulsory education. Let families lead. Let communities support. We need more renegade parents to let a thousand forms of learning flourish.

This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times.

Lance Christensen is the Vice President of Government Affairs and Education Policy at California Policy Center.

Lance Christensen

California’s Experience With Compulsory Education

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