Cursive handwriting is making a big comeback. Here's why.
USA TODAY
New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among the most recent states to require schools to teach kids old fashioned handwriting skills.
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 Jersey and Pennsylvania each 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 to Education 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?
In a November 2024 story, Education Week pointed to Common 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.
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