Each spring, Robin Freiss stands in her Cornell School District classroom, eager to shake off hours of standardized tests by instead giving her third graders a peek at cursive writing.
The lessons, which focus on proper posture and holding the paper at the right angle, generate excitement among the district’s younger learners, many of whom are being introduced to the swoops and slopes of cursive writing for the first time.
For Cornell students, the lessons are a rarity after the district stopped teaching second graders cursive writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Ms. Freiss, seeing the importance in learning the traditional writing method, took it upon herself to carve out time to ensure that students learn at least a minimum amount of cursive during their school career.
“The students enjoy learning to write in cursive and look forward to it,” Ms. Freiss said. “There are many times in their adult lives that they will have to sign important documents, and I feel they should be able to do that in cursive.”
Once a prominent form of writing, cursive has seemingly gone to the wayside in recent years. But debates over whether it should be required in schools have continued to roil education discussions, with some advocating for the writing method others call outdated.
Locally, several districts such as Bethel Park, Pittsburgh Public, South Fayette and Upper St. Clair continue to teach cursive writing. But Pennsylvania recently reentered the conversation about writing requirements when state Rep. Joe Adams, R-Pike and Wayne counties, last year said he would propose a bill requiring cursive to be taught in public schools.
“Being able to write and read cursive is a fundamental and necessary skill for everyone to learn,” Mr. Adams said in a statement. “Our founding documents like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are written in cursive. People sign their names in cursive, and official documents often require writing in cursive to memorialize business. When students are no longer taught how to read and write in cursive, they find themselves unprepared to learn from our history or be engaged in conducting business across the Commonwealth.”
Cursive writing began to phase out in 2010 when Common Core Standards, federal guidelines that must be independently adopted by states, were implemented in an effort to bring national cohesion to K-12 instruction. While the standards do not mention cursive writing, they do lay out expectations for keyboard skills in grades 3 through 5.
By the mid-2010s, around 46 states and the District of Columbia adopted the standards, leading to a decrease in cursive writing lessons. But those numbers are starting to change.
In recent years, states have led a push to once again implement cursive writing lessons throughout each school year. As of this year, 23 states require students to learn cursive including Alabama, Arizona, California, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Ohio, according to My Cursive, a website that teaches cursive writing.
Legislation for cursive writing has also been introduced in Connecticut, Iowa, Maine and Missouri.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Adams said he would propose bipartisan legislation in December that would require cursive be taught in schools across the state. The bill would not lay out specifics for how cursive writing would be taught in schools, meaning “it’s giving each school the opportunity to craft what they want,” Mr. Adams said in an interview with the Post-Gazette. “And that could be six weeks, it could be nine weeks, it could be three weeks, it could be multiple grade levels. I’m leaving that up to them.”
Any requirements around cursive writing would be a change from Pennsylvania’s current academic standards, which do not currently address cursive writing.
“Schools are not specifically required to teach that skill,” a Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson said in a statement. “Secretary [Khalid] Mumin encourages schools to determine the best paths for their students to learn to communicate effectively in writing and achieve success, regardless of the mode of writing used to get there.”
But according to Mr. Adams, cursive writing has cognitive benefits and it supports developmental milestones, he wrote in a memorandum submitted to House legislators.
“The neuroscientists, the doctors of psychology, the doctors of education, all agreed over a long period of time … how important it is for young minds, young brains,” Mr. Adams, a former school district business manager and superintendent, told the Post-Gazette.
He pointed to skills such as hand-eye coordination and artistic proficiency as things that are improved when a child learns cursive writing.
Those cognitive benefits appealed to officials at Pittsburgh Public Schools, who reimplemented cursive writing as a core resource this year as part of new English language arts curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade. The lessons follow the “science of reading,” an increasingly popular body of research focused on how students learn to read. The idea places a bigger emphasis on phonics rather than encouraging students to guess words based on context clues.
Under that program, students in kindergarten through first grade learn how to print. Those in second through fifth grade learn and use cursive.
The district, which educates around 19,000 students, chose to make cursive part of its core curriculum, Pittsburgh Public Chief Academic Officer Jala Olds-Pearson said, based on research showing that the continuous motion of the writing form uses different parts of the brain because students have to “process and think through very slowly and carefully what they’re trying to write.”
“It’s important that they be able to read cursive writing,” Ms. Olds-Pearson said. “We have a lot of primary documents that were written in cursive, the Declaration of Independence, for example. Our students need to be able to read in cursive. They don’t need to have a limitation on them.”
But the need for cursive writing has caused mixed reactions among several area districts.
At Cornell, which teaches 526 students, Superintendent Aaron Thomas challenged the idea about the need to read historical documents because “there are tools now that decipher the cursive for you, and many historical documents have faded. Plus, I would assume students are looking at these documents in a digital format anyway.”
He noted there are bigger issues Pennsylvania and districts are grappling with such as “the amount of money the state is spending on standardized testing, or the amount of instructional time wasted prepping for and giving these assessments.”
South Fayette Intermediate School Principal Tom Kaminski agreed. The district of 3,464 students currently offers cursive writing in third grade. The lessons were previously taught to second graders, but were shifted up a grade level because their fine motor skills were still in need of further development, Mr. Kaminski said.
While he noted that students will have to be able to sign their own names and decipher others’ written communications, Mr. Kaminski said that statutes requiring cursive are “unnecessary.”
“When I am not typing correspondence or signing my name, I print rather than write in cursive,” he said. “While the option to use cursive writing is a time saver for some students, there are far greater priorities in the classroom for our teachers who already balance many academic standards across multiple subjects.”
While the initiative is sparking mixed reactions, Mr. Adams said he’s received support from lawmakers and school officials from across the state. The bill will now go to the Education House Committee.
“I’m very excited,” Mr. Adams said. “Hopefully it goes through the process and can become a practical application of good law that’s going to help young people and help business.”
First Published: January 20, 2024, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: January 20, 2024, 9:08 p.m.
