Which U.S. state passed the first compulsory universal public education law in 1852?

Massachusetts passed the first compulsory universal public education law in the United States in 1852.

The Massachusetts General Court required every town to create and operate a grammar school. The law also required children to attend for a specified period and allowed fines for parents who failed to send them. It marked a major step toward state-supported, compulsory schooling.

Massachusetts had already enacted earlier education measures. In 1642, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law requiring communities to ensure that children received instruction, but the 1852 statute is commonly identified as the first compulsory universal public education law passed by a U.S. state.

The national movement developed gradually. Mississippi became the last U.S. state to enact a compulsory attendance law, doing so in 1917. School attendance requirements, ages, exemptions, and enforcement rules have changed considerably since Massachusetts’s nineteenth-century law.