Is Cursive Still Taught in Schools?
Published 2026-08-27
A sourced 2026 answer, including why the state counts disagree, what Common Core actually says, and how to check what your own district requires.
Yes, in most of the United States, but the honest answer is a range rather than a number: roughly 20 to 25 states have some cursive requirement in 2026, depending on whether you count mandates alone or mandates plus encouragement. Pennsylvania is the newest to join, through Act 2 of 2026. What a requirement actually means for your child varies enormously, and in many states it does not name a grade, a style, or a single minute of instruction.
Why the number you have seen is probably wrong
Search this question and one figure comes back over and over: 27 states. Follow it to its source and two problems appear.
The first is the verb. The tallies that produce numbers in the high twenties count states “requiring or encouraging” cursive. Once encouragement is inside the bucket, a state that merely publishes an optional model curriculum mentioning cursive gets counted the same as a state whose school code obliges every district to teach it. Those are not the same thing for a parent trying to work out whether their third grader will be taught cursive.
The second is that no neutral body maintains this list. There is no federal register of state handwriting requirements, so the counts in circulation trace back to advocacy groups and curriculum vendors, get copied without a date, and then keep circulating after the underlying laws have changed. A figure with no date attached is close to useless in a policy area where four or five states legislate in a typical year.
So the useful thing is not the count. It is the category your own state falls into.
| Category | What it means in practice | How to spot it |
|---|---|---|
| Statutory mandate | The legislature amended the school code. Districts have to teach cursive. | The word “shall” in a numbered statute |
| Standards mandate | Cursive appears in the state academic standards at named grades, so it is required content | A grade level expectation in the state ELA standards |
| Encouragement | The state supplies or endorses cursive material. Districts may use it. | “model curriculum”, “may”, “is encouraged to” |
| Silent | No state level mention at all. The decision belongs to the district, or in practice to the individual teacher. | Nothing turns up in either document |
What Common Core actually said, and what it did not
This is worth getting exactly right, because almost every argument about cursive starts here.
I searched the current Common Core English language arts standards document. The word “cursive” does not appear in it once. Handwriting appears in precisely two places, both in the Language strand: kindergarten standard L.K.1a, “Print many upper- and lowercase letters,” and grade 1 standard L.1.1a, “Print all upper- and lowercase letters.” After grade 1 the standards say nothing further about forming letters by hand. Keyboarding, by contrast, is specified with a grade and a target: by grade 4, students should “demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of one page in a single sitting,” rising to two pages in grade 5 (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts).
Two conclusions follow. Common Core never banned cursive, whatever you have read. It declined to require it, and left the question to states. But the asymmetry matters: a named grade and a measurable target for typing, silence on handwriting after age six. In a schedule with no slack, the thing without a standard attached is the thing that gets cut. That is the mechanism, and it explains the shape of the last fifteen years better than any story about a prohibition.
Three states, three different kinds of requirement
California is a statute with a soft edge. Education Code section 51210 sets the course of study for grades 1 to 6 and includes “handwriting, including instruction in cursive or joined italics in the appropriate grade levels” (California Education Code 51210). The cursive language arrived through legislation signed in October 2023. Note what it does not do: it never says which grade. “Appropriate grade levels” is left to the district, so two California schools ten miles apart can comply while doing very different things.
Texas is a standards mandate with grades named. The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English language arts spell out a four year sequence. Grade 2 students “develop handwriting by accurately forming all cursive letters using appropriate strokes when connecting letters.” Grade 3 students “write complete words, thoughts, and answers legibly in cursive leaving appropriate spaces between words.” Grade 4 requires students to “write legibly in cursive to complete assignments,” and grade 5 simply “write legibly in cursive” (19 TAC Chapter 110, Subchapter A, sections 110.4 through 110.7, adopted 2017). This is the strongest common form: introduce, apply, then maintain across grades rather than teaching cursive once and abandoning it.
Pennsylvania is the 2026 news. Act 2 of 2026, which originated as House Bill 17, was signed on 11 February 2026 and took effect on 12 April 2026, requiring cursive instruction. I could not reach the General Assembly’s bill page while writing this, because the site refused connections, so check the dates against the primary record before repeating them. You will also see a vote tally quoted alongside this law in various places. That figure describes one chamber on one day and I could not confirm it, so it is not repeated here.
What a requirement does not buy you
A mandate settles whether cursive is taught. It rarely settles anything else.
Almost none of these laws specify instructional minutes. Almost none specify a style, so the choice among traditional print, modern slant print and continuous cursive stays with the district or the individual teacher. And the most common failure mode is not absence but abandonment: cursive gets introduced in one grade, is never required in any assignment afterward, and the skill decays. A child who learned cursive letters in third grade and never wrote a cursive sentence in fourth has, functionally, not learned cursive.
On whether any of this matters: the evidence people cite most is Van der Weel and Van der Meer’s 2024 EEG study in Frontiers in Psychology, which found more widespread brain connectivity when participants wrote by hand than when they typed. It is a real result and worth knowing. It is also 36 university students writing on a touchscreen, not children learning to read, and it does not by itself settle what a second grade schedule should look like. More on that in handwriting vs typing.
What to do about it
Check your own state in ten minutes, not by reading news coverage. Two documents control the answer. Find your state’s English language arts academic standards, and find the section of your state school code that lists required subjects. Open each as a PDF and search for the word “cursive.” If it appears in neither, your state is silent and the decision belongs to your district.
Read the verb, not the headline. “Shall include” obliges a district. “May” and “model curriculum” and “is encouraged to” do not. This single distinction explains most of the disagreement between published state counts.
Ask the school four specific questions. Which grade is cursive introduced. How many minutes per week. Which style. Is it required in any assignment after the year it is taught. An answer of “yes, we do cursive” with fifteen minutes on Friday afternoons tells you to plan for practice at home.
If you are filling a gap, sequence it properly. Do not start at the letter a and work alphabetically. Group by stroke: the letters that begin with an undercurve, then the overcurve group, then the awkward joins into o, v, w and b. That reasoning is set out in why the alphabet is the wrong teaching order, and the home sequence in how to teach cursive at home.
Check print is solid before adding cursive. If a child is still reversing letters or losing the baseline in print, cursive adds a second problem rather than solving the first. See print or cursive first.
You can build practice sheets for any of this with the worksheet generator, set to continuous cursive and to the grade band you need. The letter pages cover formation letter by letter if you want to drill a specific problem letter such as f or r rather than run a whole alphabet.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reselling Zaner-Bloser(R), D’Nealian(R) or Handwriting Without Tears(R); those are registered trademarks of their respective owners, and the styles offered here are described functionally as traditional print, modern slant print, simplified block print and continuous cursive.