Many people of a certain age remember practicing loops and waves, moving our small hands clutching pencils across pages with light blue dotted and solid lines. But in many schools, that elementary school rite of passage went away as kids turned to computers and keyboards.
A growing number of states, though, are requiring schools to start teaching cursive writing to students once again.New JerseyandPennsylvaniaeach enacted legislation in 2026 requiring schools to teach kids to read and write the way their grandparents did. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the legislation on Feb. 11; in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed the mandate into law before leaving office in January.
According toEducation Week, more than half of U.S. states now require or strongly encourage schools to teach students to read and write in cursive — compared to just 14 states just a decade ago.
So what's behind this writing renaissance?
How cursive fell out of style in school
In a November 2024 story, Education Week pointed toCommon Core, a set of recommended educational standards launched in 2009 and initially adopted by 46 states. Those standards emphasized mathematics and English/language arts, but did not include any specifics on cursive. Keyboarding instead was seen as a way to prepare students for the computer- and digitally-focused jobs of the future.
Teachers, with just so much instructional time and increasingly tighter standards, had to make choices. School districts wanted to ensure students were meeting requirements for math, science and reading. Some states and districts dropped cursive instruction. New Jersey stopped requiring it in 2010, for example.
Schools also began to pivot more toward technology and away from hand-written work. Students in many districts now have tablets, Chromebooks and laptops issued by their schools, in addition to the technology in their homes and the smartphones in many of their hands.
'A big kid skill'
Silvia Pereira teaches in the Newark (New Jersey) school district, but she spoke to USA TODAY in her capacity as a leader in the American Federation of Teachers' New Jersey chapter and the Newark Teachers' Union. She said most teachers she's spoken with agree students should learn cursive and are mostly happy to incorporate it into their lessons — even as the 44-year-old, whose own children learned cursive in school, admits that some of her younger teaching peers never learned it themselves.
"It went away for a while in some districts," she said. "Some teachers, like with anything new, will have some hesitance. We also have to be mindful that some teachers are learning this skill themselves. So we have to make sure we support staff who aren't familiar with it so they in turn can support their students."
She pointed to benefits of cursive: Students can hone their fine motor skills. It forces them to take their time writing, which in turn helps with reading and writing fluency. And it enables them to read handwritten letters, historic documents and correspondence. A native of Portugal, she said children in Europe never stopped learning cursive.
And, she said, kids seem to enjoy it.
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"Once a teacher really sees how much joy the kids are having with it, learning something new and realizing they can actually do it — they are really excited about it. Younger students think, 'This is a big kid skill,' and they want to do it and look forward to doing it."
States decide, schools on the hook
New Jersey's Democratic-controlled Legislature voted nearly unanimously to reintroduce cursive writing in schools statewide. But the mandate had broad bipartisan support from lawmakers even in Pennsylvania's sharply divided Statehouse.
USA TODAY reached out to the three Republicans and two Democrats in Pennsylvania's Senate who voted "no" on the legislation mandating cursive instruction in Commonwealth schools. State Sen. Dawn Keefer, a Republican, said in a brief phone interview that she supported students' learning cursive but voted no because she believed the choice should be left to individual school districts, not mandated by the state.
"That was my only reservation," she said. "It's another mandate we're putting on schools without considering whether they have the necessary resources. I've gotten calls from various school board members who ask me, 'Do you want to run my school board or should I?'"
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Her own children learned cursive, she added, and she recognizes the "huge value in learning it."
One of her Democratic colleagues in the Pennsylvania Senate, Timothy Kearney, had similar sentiments.
"The evidence is strong that learning cursive provides many benefits in learning development, but I'm generally losing patience with so many legislative mandates getting placed on schools," his office wrote in an emailed response to a USA TODAY inquiry.
In a Feb. 6 letter to the Record of Bergen County (New Jersey), part of the USA TODAY Network, Dierdre Glenn Paul, an education professor at Montclair State University, called the state's cursive instruction mandate "unnecessary," and something that adds consternation to children whose fine motor skills develop slower than their peers' and more pressure to schools' already overloaded curriculum.
Phaedra Trethan is a national correspondent for USA TODAY, writing about history and Americana. Contact her by email at ptrethan@usatoday.com, on X @wordsbyphaedra, on BlueSky @byphaedra, or on Threads @by_phaedra
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Is cursive still taught in schools? More states are requiring it.
