A considerable body of scholarship has examined the history of compulsory attendance in the United States in an effort to explain why compulsory attendance laws were enacted, what effects they had on school attendance rates, and what made enforcement of these laws effective eventually. Recent research has revealed that some long-standing assumptions and conclusions about compulsory attendance warrant reconsideration. This essay adds to this scholarship which is reconsidering the history of compulsory attendance by examining the previously unconsidered role that the courts played in the transformation of compulsory attendance laws into "compulsory education" laws (laws that mandate attendance at a school) into "compulsory education" laws that regulate schooling and the curricular content of a school education. This essay also calls attention to the critical but unappreciated role that state courts played in the historical development of U.S. school systems by showing how their decisions regarding compulsory attendance shaped the course of the system's institutional development. The fact that the courts upheld compulsory attendance legislation as constitutional has been taken for granted and not been considered anything that required examination or explanation. But this essay's analysis of the judicial decisions that established the constitutionality of compulsory attendance laws reveals that these decisions were neither perfunctory nor foreordained--and in no way minor decisions. Indeed, this essay argues that these decisions justified compulsory attendance in a way that abrogated the traditional right of parents to control the educational content of their children's schooling and gave states a "carte blanche" to regulate all educational content. This essay further reveals that the rationale for expanded state authority over education set the stage for the legal conflicts of "Meyer v. Nebraska" (1923) and "Pierce v. Society of Sisters" (1925)--the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are the basis for the right of parental choice in schooling as well as the modern "right of personal liberty." This essay ultimately argues that the judicial decisions that established the constitutionality of compulsory attendance are the necessary backdrop to understand fully the decision of "Meyer" and "Pierce." (Contains 1 table and 121 footnotes.)