1. Baker, David P., “Schooling All the Masses: Reconsidering the Origins of American Schooling in the Postbellum Era,” Sociology of Education 72, no. 3 (1999): 197–215.Google Scholar

2. For overviews of state law and regulation in the nineteenth century, see John, Richard R., “Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–20;CrossRefGoogle ScholarNovak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72;Google Scholar Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Gerstle, Gary, “The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century,” in The Unsustainable American State, ed. Jacobs, Lawrence and King, Desmond (New York, 2009), 61–87.Google Scholar

3. Daniel Carpenter, “Regulation,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Political History, ed. Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman (Princeton, 2009), 2:665. See also Daniel Carpenter, “Confidence Games: How Does Regulation Constitute Markets?” in Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation, ed. Edward J. Balleisen and David A. Moss (New York, 2009), 164–92.

4. See Nancy Beadie’s review of the literature in “Toward a History of Education Markets in the United States,” Social Science History 32, no. 1 (2008): 47–73.

5. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society (New York, 1983), 75–103, 136–81; William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, 2005), 10–44.

6. On Hughes, see Vincent Lannie, Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop Hughes, Governor Seward, and the New York School Controversy (Cleveland, 1968); on Purcell, see James A. Gutowski, “Politics and Parochial Schools in Archbishop John Purcell’s Ohio” (Ph.D. diss., Cleveland State University, 2009); on McQuaid, see Frederick James Zwierlein, The Life and Letters of Bishop McQuaid: Prefaced with the History of Catholic Rochester Before His Episcopate (Rochester, N.Y., 1926), 2:119–53.

7. Dolan, Jay P., The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 271–72.Google Scholar

8. “Decrees of the Council—Title VI,” in Catholic Education in America: A Documentary History, ed. Neil G. McCluskey (New York, 1964), 94. The text here is translated from the Latin. Parents could be exempted from enrolling their children in parochial schools if “a sufficient training in religion is given either in their own homes, or in other Catholic schools; or when because of a sufficient reason, approved by the bishop, with all due precautions and safeguards, it is licit to send them to other schools.”

9. Gleason, Philip, “Baltimore III and Education,” Catholic Historian 4, nos. 3/4 (1985): 273–313.Google Scholar See also Memorial Volume: A History of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, November 9–December 7, 1884 (Baltimore, 1885), 17, 170.

10. See, e.g., Diocese of Pittsburgh, “De Jeventute Instituenda,” chap. 4, in Statuta Dioeceos Pittsburgensis in Synodis Dioecesanis (1906), 34–36, Historical Records Collection, Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh; Diocese of La Crosse, “Rules and Regulations of the School Boards of the Diocese of La Crosse,” Article VI, in Second Annual Report of the Diocesan School Board of the Diocese of La Crosse, 8, Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives Pamphlet Collection; Diocese of Fort Wayne, Fifth Annual Report of the Diocesan School Board (Fort Wayne, Ind., 1884), Georgetown University Special Collections.

11. Folkmar, Daniel, “The Duration of School Attendance in Chicago and Milwaukee,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 12, no. 1 (1898): 279.Google Scholar

12. James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan (1932; repr. New York, 2004), 61.

13. Walter, Fr., “Census-Taking and Its By-Products,” The Ecclesiastical Review 71 (November 1924): 454.Google Scholar

14. See, e.g., McNichols, John, “Education: School-Picking,” America Magazine 15, no. 16 (29 July 1916): 385;Google ScholarHeiermann, F., “Education: What School for Your Child,” America Magazine 19, no. 20 (24 August 1918): 485–86.Google Scholar

15. Hogan, Joseph S., “Education: The Parish School,” American Magazine 23, no. 19 (28 August 1920): 454Google Scholar; “Catholic Parents and the Catholic School,” American Magazine 23, no. 23 (2 October 1920): 567.

16. “The Selection of a School,” Dziennik Zjednoczenia, 19 August 1926, Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_1_0234.

17. Hogan, Joseph S. J., “Education: Can We Take a Chance?” America Magazine 23, no. 19 (28 August 1930): 454Google Scholar; “Catholic Parents and the Catholic School,” America Magazine 23, no. 23 (2 October 1920): 566–67.

18. Gerald J. Schnepp, “Leakage from a Catholic Parish” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1942), 169–70, 174; Louise Montgomery, The American Girl in the Stockyard District (Chicago, 1913), 11; see also Robert Enslow O’Brien, “A Study of the Roman Catholic Elementary Schools of Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1928), 44–45; 64; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 283.

19. Reverend David Anthony Sylvester, “Why Catholic Children Are Not Attending Catholic Schools: A Study of the Reasons Offered by Their Parents” (Master’s thesis, Catholic University of America, 1947), 57–60; Schnepp, “Leakage from a Catholic Parish,” 183, 187–88.

20. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008), 185–87; John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996), chap 1.

21. Urban landlords often contributed to this constant movement by offering new tenants one month’s free rent. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York, 1985), 32.

22. Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 31, 85.

23. Howard P. Chudacoff, Judith E. Smith, and Peter C. Baldwin, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2010), 98–99; S. J. Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills: Working-Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870–1907 (Pittsburgh, 1989), 53.

24. Chudacoff, Smith, and Baldwin, Evolution of American Urban Society, 113.

25. Le Roy E. Bowman, “Population Mobility and Community Organization,” in The Urban Community: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, 1925, ed. Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago, 1926), 160.

26. Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois (Chicago, 1917), 102, 105.

27. Folkmar, “The Duration of School Attendance in Chicago and Milwaukee,” 261. See also O’Brien, “A Study of the Roman Catholic Elementary Schools of Chicago,” 60–62; Louise Montgomery, The American Girl in the Stockyard District (Chicago, 1913), 10.

28. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Education, Together with the Fifty-First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools, of Rhode Island (Providence, 1896), appendix, 39.

29. Lila Ver Planck North, “Pittsburgh Schools,” in The Pittsburgh Survey, ed. Paul Underwood Kellogg (New York, 1914), 246.

30. New York City Department of Education, Bureau of Attendance, Report of the Bureau of Attendance for the Period between July 31, 1915 to July 31, 1918 (1918), 256, 265.

31. The Board of Public Education, School District of Philadelphia: Bureau of Compulsory Education, Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1915 (1916), 12; Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1919 (1920), 11; Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1920 (1921), 16–17.

32. On the centrality of compulsory attendance laws to building state capacity, see Tracy Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago, 2012).

33. Fifteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, Part II: Truancy in Wisconsin (Madison, 1911), 54.

34. New York City Bureau of Attendance, First Annual Report of the Director of Attendance, 8–9.

35. Cleveland Public Schools, Sixty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education (Cleveland, 1901), 44.

36. Gertrude Howe Britton, An Intensive Study of the Causes of Truancy in Eight Chicago Public Schools including a Home Investigation of Eight Hundred Truant Children (Chicago, 1906), 23, 25–26, 30–31; Maryland State Board of Education, Report Covering One Year of Compulsory School Attendance in the Counties of Maryland, Including an Account of Five Years of Compulsory School Attendance in Baltimore County (1918), 19.

37. Maryland State Board of Education, Report Covering One Year of Compulsory School Attendance, 19.

38. H. C. Ginter, “Attendance Officer’s Report,” Annual Report of the Public Schools of York, PA (York, 1913–14), 100. The idea might have derived from licensed child laborers (selling newspapers, for example), who often wore badges to certify their excuse from compulsory school attendance laws.

39. Britton, An Intensive Study of the Causes of Truancy, 23–31.

40. Abbott and Breckinridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, 105. See also Harry Gustav Abraham, “A Study of Pupil Accounting in City School Systems as Revealed by School Surveys” (Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 1929), 75–76.

41. Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of the State of Wisconsin for the Two Years Ending June 30, 1884 (Madison, 1885), 13; ibid. (1886), 19–20; ibid. (1888), 1–2, 19.

42. William T. Harris, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1888–89, Volume II (Washington, D.C., 1891), 611.

43. Patrick Francis Quigley, Compulsory Education: The State of Ohio Versus The Rev. Patrick Francis Quigley, D.D. (New York, 1894), iii, 94.

44. Charles N. Lischka, Private Schools and State Laws: The Text as Well as a Classified Summary of All State Laws Governing Private Schools, in Force in 1924 (Washington, D.C., 1924), 107–8.

45. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Education, Together with the Fifty-Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools of Rhode Island (Providence, 1897): appendix, 38.

46. Supt. Couglin, Jas. L., “Laws Necessary to Render the Compulsory Attendance Act Efficient,” Pennsylvania School Journal 47 (Lancaster, 1899), 372.Google Scholar

47. Mathews, John Mabry, Principles of American State Administration (New York, 1917), 334.Google Scholar

48. State of Wisconsin, Fifteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, 54. See School Survey, Grand Rapids Michigan (Grand Rapids, 1916), 16.

49. Caroline Hedges, “The Children of the Stockyards,” Transactions of the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography 3, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1913), 180.

50. Quigley, Compulsory Education, viii, 570–71. For other evidence of resistance to reporting, see Abbott and Breckinridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, 105; State of Wisconsin, Fifteenth Biennial Report, 46.

51. Tyack, David and Berkowitz, Michael, “The Man Nobody Liked: Toward a Social History of the Truant Officer, 1890–1940,” American Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 31–54.Google Scholar

52. New York City Department of Education, Bureau of Attendance, Report of the Bureau of Attendance for the Period Between July 31, 1915 to July 31, 1918 (1919), 20, 271.

53. Paul Henry Neystrom, “The School Census” (Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1910).

54. David Snedden and William H. Allen, School Reports and School Efficiency (New York, 1908), 128–50; Forest Chester Ensign, Compulsory School Attendance and Child Labor: A Study of the Historical Development of Regulations Compelling Attendance and Limiting the Labor of Children in a Selected Group of States (Iowa City, 1921), 146–47.

55. See, e.g., Arthur B. Moehlman, Child Accounting: A Discussion of the General Principles Underlying Educational Child Accounting Together with the Development of a Uniform Procedure (Detroit, 1924).

56. Fernando Bermejo, The School Attendance Service in American Cities (Menasha, Wisc., 1924), 35–36. For descriptions of the various methods used, see Ethel Hanks, “Administration of Child-Labor Laws, Part 4: Employment-Certificate System, Wisconsin,” U.S. Department of Labor Industrial Series, no. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1921), 79; Paul Klapper, “The Bureau of Attendance and Child Welfare of the New York City Public School System,” Educational Review 50 (November 1915); School District of Philadelphia, Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1922 (1923), 11–12; John Dearling Haney, Registration of City School Children: A Consideration of the Subject of the City School Census (New York, 1910), 60–112.

57. Cleveland Public Schools, Sixty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education (1901), 44. See also State of Wisconsin, Fifteenth Biennial Report, 46.

58. Ensign, Compulsory School Attendance and Child Labor, 147.

59. New York City Bureau of Attendance, First Annual Report of the Director of Attendance, 189.

60. New York City Department of Education, Bureau of Attendance, Report of the Bureau of Attendance, 265–67.

61. McClancy, Joseph V. S., “Discussion,” in Brother Azarias, “The Accurate Keeping of School Records,” NCEA Bulletin 13 (November 1916): 275.Google Scholar

62. Rt. Rev. Schrembs, Joseph, “Discussion,” in Walter George Smith, “Educational Legislation as It Affects Catholic Interests,” NCEA Bulletin 9 (November 1912): 133.Google Scholar

63. Hoban, C. F., “School Legislation in Relation to Non-State Schools,” The Catholic Educational Association of Pennsylvania Bulletin 2, no. 1 (March 1922): 42.Google Scholar

64. Cubberley, Ellwood P., State and County Educational Reorganization: The Revised Constitution and School Code of the State of Osceola (New York, 1914), 194.Google Scholar

65. Sister M. de Sales to Philip R. McDevitt, 18 February 1910, box 1, folder: February 1910, Superintendent of Schools, Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center [hereafter PAHRC], Philadelphia; McDevitt to Captain William Thornton, 21 February 1910; Henry J. Gideon to McDevitt, 10 November 1911, box 2, folder: July–December 1911, ibid.; McDevitt to Rev. M. A. Kopytkewicz, 11 November 1911, ibid.; Gideon to McDevitt, 13 November 1912, box 2, folder: October–December 1912, ibid.

66. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 119; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Edward Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1969), 170–71.

67. Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (New York, 1989); Stephen Lassonde, Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven, 2007); Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York, 2000); Goldin and Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology.

68. William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, 1999), 80–102.

69. Edward Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, Volume II, 1920–1940 (Madison, 1972), 42–43; Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920, 440. Krug notes that even high schools in sparsely populated states like Idaho had many of these features.

70. This was the average cost at four large township high schools in Cook County, Illinois in 1914. The average cost of township high schools in Illinois, generally, was a smaller though still substantial $63.72. Journal of Proceedings of the Sixty-second Annual Meeting of the Illinois State Teachers’ Association and Sections (Springfield, 1915), 72.

71. James A. Burns, The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System (New York, 1912), 293.

72. Rev. Burns, James A., “Catholic Secondary Schools,” American Catholic Quarterly Review 26 (July 1901): 488–91.Google Scholar Burns assumed that many more parochial schools had one or more of the “higher grades,” without having high schools.

73. Given this absence of Catholic high schools, prominent Catholic writers frequently encouraged parents to enroll their children in public institutions. See, e.g., Murphy, John T., “Catholic Secondary Education in the United States,” The American Catholic Quarterly Review 22 (July 1897): 451–64.Google Scholar

74. “Promoting to the High School,” The School Journal 64, no. 24 (14 June 1902): 689. In the 1840s and 1850s, urban high school typically required a year of prior public school attendance. See Reese, Origins of the American High School, 146, 157.

75. See, e.g., Boston Public Schools, Rules of the School Committee and Regulations of the Public Schools of the City of Boston (Boston, 1888), 47.

76. On public high school accreditation, see Marc VanOverbeke, The Standardization of American Schooling: Linking Secondary and Higher Education (New York, 2008); for Catholic high school accreditation, see Ryan, Ann Marie, “Negotiating Assimilation: Chicago Catholic High Schools’ Pursuit of Accreditation in the Early Twentieth Century,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2006): 354–55Google Scholar; Fayette Breaux Veverka, “For God and Country”: Catholic Schooling in the 1920s (New York, 1988), 127–52.

77. School Board of the City of Milwaukee, Wisc., Rules and Regulations (1885), 47; Milwaukee Board of School Directors, Rules and Regulations (1898), 43.

78. Milwaukee Board of School Directors, Rules and Regulations (1901), 56–57.

79. School Board of the City of Milwaukee, Proceedings of the School Board from May, 1905 to May, 1906 (1906), 409.

80. For Chicago, see O’Brien, Robert E., “Relations Between the Public and Catholic Schools of Chicago,” Journal of Educational Sociology 3, no. 2 (1929): 121–24.Google Scholar For Omaha, Nebraska’s accreditation system, see Transcript of Oral Argument of Arthur F. Mullen, in Behalf of Plaintiffs-in-Error at 5, Meyer v. State of Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923) (October Term, 1922, No. 325). For Parsons, Kansas, see Patrick Creyhon et al. v. Board of Education of the City of Parsons, Kansas, 99 Kan. 824 (1917).

81. O’Brien, “Relations Between the Public and Catholic Schools of Chicago,” 124. O’Brien, a critic of parish education, reported that 162 out of Chicago’s 214 Catholic elementary parochial schools were accredited, with “overcrowding” being the reason for those nonaccredited.

82. Gibbons, E. F., “School Supervision—Its Necessity, Aims and Methods,” Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Catholic Educational Association (1905): 167.Google Scholar

83. Reverend Campbell, Paul E., “School Records and Reports,” in National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 28, no. 1 (November 1931): 596.Google Scholar

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86. Helen C. Williams to America Press, 20 January 1928, box 9, folder 19, America Magazine Archives, Georgetown University Special Collections, Washington, D.C.

87. Gibbons, E. F., “School Supervision—Its Necessity, Aims and Methods,” Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Catholic Educational Association (1905): 174–55.Google Scholar

88. E. F. Gibbons to Francis Howard, 23 January 1914, folder: Gibbons, E.F, box 9, Bishop Francis W. Howard Collection, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

89. Reverend Discoll, F. A., “Teacher Preparation—The Present Problem,” The Catholic Educational Association of Pennsylvania Bulletin 2, no. 1 (March 1922): 33.Google Scholar

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91. Rev. Sullivan, John J., “Educational Legislation of Pennsylvania in Relation to Catholic Interests,” National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 4 (1907): 82.Google Scholar

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94. Rev. James T. O’Dowd, “Standardization and Its Influence on Catholic Secondary Education in the United States” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1935), 122.

95. Lischka, Private Schools and State Laws, 5. A summary of the laws appears on 102–8.

96. Abbott and Breckinridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, 102.