States debate making cursive instruction mandatory

People fear future generations won’t be able to sign their own names, much less read the original Declaration of Independence, if students don’t learn cursive in school. The cursive debate was churning before the Common Core State Standards came out in 2010, but the absence of cursive from the controversial benchmarks has added to the furor.

Some state lawmakers want to mandate schools teach students cursive. But opponents say the traditional form of handwriting is no longer necessary. Others argue local schools and teachers should decide such matters for themselves.

“Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson from first through sixth grade and a separate grade on report cards,” notes a 2010 “Information Capsule” from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. “Since that time, however, its importance in the elementary school curriculum has declined steadily.” Some credit that decline to increased prevalence of technology and decreased need. But others attribute it to increased time spent on test-prep and meeting standards that don’t measure handwriting.

According to a 2012 Policy Update by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), the Common Core State Standards don’t include cursive. But some states do include cursive in their curriculums. Education boards in Alabama, California, and Georgia added cursive to the Common Core standards.

State legislatures also have taken up the issue. For example, North Carolina and South Carolina passed bills in 2013 and 2014 to ensure teaching cursive and multiplication tables, and Tennessee passed a law last year requiring cursive in public schools. In February, the Arkansas legislature passed a bill requiring public elementary schools to teach cursive. And just last week, Nevada’s Senate Education Committee held a hearing on a bill that would require all public elementary schools in the state to teach students cursive by the end of third grade.

But not all states have had any easy time getting cursive mandates in place. At the end of February, the Indiana Senate passed a bill requiring cursive in schools, sending the legislation to the state House. But this is the fourth year such a bill has been introduced, and the bill has died in the House in the past.

Opponents to teaching cursive say it’s no longer a good use of time in the era of the keyboard. But proponents cite studies and experts who say it helps brain development. “Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual and tactile information and fine motor dexterity,” wrote William R. Klemm, a senior professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, on a Psychology Today blog.

Other supporters cite research from the College Board showing students who wrote in cursive scored slightly better on the SAT essay than those who used print. Still others wonder how future generations will read important primary resources written in the curly script.

But some say the debate is misplaced.

“It really doesn’t matter if it’s manuscript or cursive,” Steve Graham, an education professor at Arizona State University who studies writing instruction, told NPR. “It is kind of silly, in a way, that you have state legislatures getting all tied up in this.”

Graham is more concerned with the lack of writing in general: “We don’t see much writing going on at all across the school day.”

Nonetheless, the cursive debate continues in states across the country, and many agree with what Kitty Nicholson, former deputy director of the National Archives Conservation Lab, told PBS: “If you’ve seen the elegant writing from the 18th century, elegant writing of many of the great significant documents in the National Archives and other places, to lose that elegance, that sense of elegance, it feels like losing a bit of civilization.”