Some parents, educators push back on Missouri bill requiring cursive be taught in school

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lisa Meinen-Doerksen, a mother of two children at Border Star Montessori in Brookside, said she likes cursive writing. She believes it has helped her children’s fine motor skills and their ability to write from left to right.

However, when she thinks about public education, teaching her children cursive writing is not at the top of her list.

“It’s a good mental exercise,” Meinen-Doerksen said, “but I don’t believe they will be using cursive in their lives.”

Yet, several Missouri Republican lawmakers are again pushing to pass bills that would require cursive handwriting to be taught in Missouri public schools.

Missouri State Reps. Peggy McGaugh of Carrollton, and Renee Reuter of Imperial along with Missouri State Sen. Curtis Trent, who represents the Springfield area, have sponsored bills that call for the requirement during this legislative session.

The benefits, they’ve highlighted, include brain stimulation, improved academic performance and help for children with dyslexia and dysgraphia.

But adding cursive to the curriculum has been no easy feat. Former Rep. Gretchen Bangert, a Democrat, carried the bill for seven years without success before McGaugh picked it up.

The bill was put onto other bills, Bangert said, which was one of the reasons why it failed. But even when a couple of those bills made it through, the cursive requirement wasn’t included.

“It was on an education bill, two of them, and then it was ripped off in the Senate for some reason,” Bangert said. “I don’t know why. I couldn’t get an answer from the Senators as to why they took it off.”

In Missouri, Republicans and Democrats have supported cursive bills, proving it to be a bipartisan issue. However, although teaching cursive has garnered support from both sides, bills making it a teaching requirement have yet to be pushed through the finish line.

David Price, president of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers, said that currently, Kansas City Public Schools does not require its schools to teach cursive as part of their curriculum. While he did teach it to his class at Benjamin Banneker Elementary, it wasn’t something he focused on.

“I taught third grade, so I would introduce cursive toward the end of the year as just kind of a fun extra thing,” Price said. “But it was not a part of our curriculum.”

Nationwide, the number of schools teaching cursive has grown.

During the mid-2010s, most states adopted the Common Core State Standards, which did not explicitly require teaching cursive but emphasized keyboarding. Around 10 years ago, only 14 states required schools to teach cursive. Last year, Kentucky became the 24th state to require cursive to be taught.

One of the biggest arguments for requiring cursive is so children can read historic documents, which are penned in cursive, Trent said.

“Cursive writing is a key part of literacy, of being able to access many historic and original sources that were written in cursive,” he said. “I think it’s a very effective way to take notes and do the kind of day-to-day writing that one has to do to function in many professions.”

But Price, whose union opposes the bills, said that while he sees the benefits of teaching cursive, there aren’t strong enough arguments to support it.

“I know the biggest issue is that someone doesn’t know how to sign their name, and the old tell-tale of ‘they can’t read the founding documents’ and things like that,” Price said. “I think nowadays, that’s becoming less and less of a worry. You can find the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in print.”

Price said cursive used to be important when all communication relied upon handwriting everything. But that isn’t how the world works anymore.

“In those days, you had to be able to write,” Price said. “If you had a 30-page paper, you had to handwrite 30 pages. The only form of communication was handwriting. And, now, that’s become less, and there are very few people nowadays who do handwritten anything.”

While Bangert’s bill highlighted that there would be no fiscal impact on the education department if the bill passed, Price said there are still a few downsides to taking on mandatory cursive.

He said his union opposes the bills because of the additional testing.

“It doesn’t benefit everyone the same way,” Price said, “and could be a detriment to someone who is behind in their reading development or is struggling with certain aspects of language.”

Montessori schools typically teach cursive before print, according to Montessori For Today, which is why Meinen-Doerksen’s children learned to read and write in it. However, Meinen-Doerksen disagrees with the idea that learning cursive is necessary as technology becomes a bigger part of children’s lives.

“Most likely, elementary school children today will not need to write checks or sign documents,” she said. “They will not need to pen letters. All of that will be done electronically.”

But Trent disagrees. While technology can be helpful, he said students should not take it for granted.

“Technology is a tool,” Trent said. “It shouldn’t replace knowledge or capability in a person. It should supplement the knowledge and capability people naturally develop.”

Much of the focus on teaching cursive is related to understanding and conserving the past, but Meinen-Doerksen said she doesn’t believe that is enough of a reason for children to learn it now.

“Teaching cursive to children simply because that’s what you learned is like older generations telling me I needed to learn shorthand if I wanted to go into the office world,” she said. “I think that’s a weak argument.”