Sure it was. In the "Old Deluder Satan Law," officially called the Massachusetts Education Law of 1647 established a compulsory education system (every town with 50 families had to hire a teacher; those few towns wit 100 families had to establish a "grammar school" to prepare students to go to Harvard.)
To be sure, the American educational system was influenced by the Prussians - just as our military was. (Clauswitz's On War redefined our military in the 19th century.) Even so, Prussian excesses do not discredit complusary education any more than the Eisenhower Interstate System is discredited by Hitler's autobahn.
Sure it was. In the "Old Deluder Satan Law," officially called the Massachusetts Education Law of 1647 established a compulsory education system (every town with 50 families had to hire a teacher...
Even the entry from Wikipedia says that "As a practical matter this law did not require towns to have schools, as very few towns in the Massachusetts of 1647 had at least one hundred families, nor did it require young people to attend school."
My point is that compulsory attendance laws didn't take off until the great Irish immigration scares of the 1800s, when compulsory attendance laws were used to force the children of poor Irish Catholic immigrants into the Protestant government schools.
This is the history of the Know Nothings, and the Blaine amendments that were added to most state constitutions. The high point of the movement was reached in the late 1920s, with the SCOTUS case of KKK vs. Society of Sisters, where the Oregon KKK tried to outlaw private (i.e., Catholic) schools.
The model for these government schools, which were formed in the mid-1800s, was Prussian. Horace Mann praised these schools (which he never saw in operation) in his testimony before the Boston school board.
Industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller supported and further refined the Prussian model of schooling, because it produced compliant drones for industry. The advent of behavioral psychology at roughly the same time had a profound effect upon the teacher colleges that were being set up, thus dooming generations of children to educational "laboratories."
The history of compulsory schooling in America is uniformly bleak, from beginning to end.