No Nation Left Behind? Assessing the Impact of Compulsory Schooling Laws on Immigrant Assimilation

Abstract

Did the expansion of compulsory education create a national identity? In this paper, I explore this question within the context of the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1930). Using the expansion of compulsory schooling laws, I leverage both regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences identification strategies combined with individual-level data on the entire population of immigrants residing in the United States in 1930 to estimate the causal effect of mass education on assimilation. The results provide evidence of a precise null effect of education on national identity formation in the United States. Further tests provide evidence that the lack of this effect resulted from mass implementation failures. These results imply a limited scope for mass schooling to explain the assimilation of the United States's diverse population in addition to highlighting the importance of understanding why states fail to build national identity.

Does education predict gender role attitudes?: Evidence from European datasets

“…Our empirical setup mimics the emerging research demonstrating education's pertinence in determining public attitudes towards immigration (D'Hombres ' and Nunziata, 2016;Finseraas et al, 2018;Cavaille and Marshall, 2019;Mazumder, 2019;Margaryan et al, 2021) and political institutions (Siedler, 2010;Cheruvu, 2020;Kunst et al, 2020).…”

Becoming White: How Military Service Turned Immigrants into Americans

“…Instead, I show that participation in mass warfare can jointly affect both channels. Work by Mazumder (2019) shows that the rise of mass schooling had a limited role to play in shaping cultural integration in American history-an important finding to note given the extensive literature on the central role of mass education in shaping national identity. This suggests that future work should seek to better understand the conditions under which different types of state policies can successfully shift either immigrant or native values.…”

“…These results show that military service might be one way in which to achieve integration beyond political incorporation, though this obviously raises a number of troubling normative issues. In related work, Mazumder (2019) shows how mass mobilization for war might be a unique force in creating national identity by showing that schooling, another nation-building institution hypothesized by classic works such as Hobsbawm (1990), seems to have a precise null effect on the formation of national identity among both immigrants and native-born citizens both historically and today. Moreover, Fouka (2019a) shows how language policies aimed at homogenizing and assimilating immigrants can actually backfire.…”