What's Behind Cursive Comeback In 22 States, Including Maryland?

MARYLAND — Cursive writing is making a comeback in Maryland, one of 22 states that now requires students to be taught some sort of cursive in a pushback against Common Core Standards that effectively canceled classroom instruction of the flowing form of penmanship.

Cursive handwriting instruction started disappearing from school curriculums with the widely adopted standards for K-12 education, set by a group of governors and school officers from around the country and officially launched in 2010.

Maryland's law on cursive took effect in 2020. Handwriting in cursive starts in second grade and continues to fifth grade. The curriculum dictates that testing for the second grade will be on letter formation, case writing. From the third grade to the fifth grade, testing is done on the ability to create a final cursive written document that is readable.

The latest state to return cursive writing instruction to public schools was California, where the Legislature unanimously passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation requiring it be taught to public school students in grades one through six. The law takes effect Jan. 1.

Besides California and Maryland, others now requiring some cursive writing instruction are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Ilinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to MyCursive.com, a website that tracks cursive writing requirements nationwide

The Case Against Cursive

The Common Core State Standards eliminated cursive writing as a requirement largely to increase students’ use of technology, Sue Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the English/language arts standards, told Education Week in 2016.

“We thought that more and more of student communications and adult communications are via technology. And knowing how to use technology to communicate and to write was most critical for students,” she said at the time.

The standards placed more emphasis on composition and the mechanics of writing. To become fluent writers, educators told those drafting the standards, students needed both instruction time for their teachers and time to write.

“One of the things we heard from teachers around the country — in some cases, obviously not all — was that sometimes cursive writing takes an enormous amount of instructional time,” Pimental told Education Week. “You could be spending time on other things rather than students practicing cursive writing. It’s really a matter of emphasis.”

Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, told Stateline there’s “not much evidence cursive matters” — especially as schools struggle to return to pre-pandemic operations.

“If you are going to spend time on some indication of written communication, keyboarding skills are more important,” Polikoff said. “In the scheme of educational policies, I’m not sure there’s a single topic I care less about. We’ve fallen behind during COVID, we’re dealing with chronic absenteeism, student mental health is in crisis, and we’re spending time on cursive? That’s what we’re mandating?”

The Case For Cursive

For many, the exclusion of cursive from Common Core was like the death of a beloved family member. “Based on fluid movements observed in nature,” cursive had been taught in U.S. schools since about 1850, according to the National Museum of American History.

Without knowing how to write cursive, today’s students are unable to read founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — let alone handwritten notes from their grandparents and great-grandparents, pro-cursive advocates argue.

If cursive becomes a forgotten language skill, the translation of those and other important documents could be left to a small pool of trained translators and experts, said historian Drew Gilpin Faust, speaking to NPR last year about her story in The Atlantic, “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive.”

Faust, Harvard University’s highest-ranking professor at the time The Atlantic essay was published, was teaching an undergraduate seminar on Civil War history when she discovered two-thirds of the students in her class couldn’t read the cursive in important documents of the era.

“And I was just stunned. I had no idea,” Faust told NPR. “So I set out to explore some of the implications of that for historians and for history, because I am a historian, but also more broadly, just what it means when you can't read your birthday card from your grandmother and you have to have your mother translate it for you.”

Faust said her essay wasn’t intended as a call to restore cursive, but to alert people to some of the consequences when not everyone can read the documents of the past or those affecting current circumstances.

“I mean, just imagine if you had some kind of contract that you had signed and you couldn't read it and someone told you, well, this is what’s in the contract. That’s what’s in the contract,” she said. “And then later you might find that it was something else.

“So there are limits in your power, in your sense of how the world works and your sense of how the world used to work when you can’t have access to a means of communication.”