Dana Russell teaches cursive to her 3rd grade class at Laurel School Upper Campus in Menlo Park, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. A law taking effect in 2024 will require cursive instruction.

California kept cursive in its state standards for third and fourth grades, but it wasn’t enforced, Quirk-Silva said, leaving it up to the discretion of districts and often individual teachers.

My own experience with cursive writing could have been traumatizing, had kids of the 1960s been as aware of the Trauma-Over-Everything-Syndrome that proliferates today.

After watching their teacher meticulously draw the alphabet in cursive on a whiteboard, students in Patricia Durelli’s fourth-grade class pulled out their pencils to practice writing the letters ...

And then it turned out that two-thirds of the students in the class couldn't read cursive. And I was just stunned. I had no idea.

“I didn’t know how to read it,” said Sierra, 8, a third-grader at Dublin Elementary School. “I thought it was like a different language.” ...

Dana Russell teaches cursive to her 3rd grade class at Laurel School Upper Campus in Menlo Park, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. A law taking effect in 2024 will require cursive instruction.