The Ohio Senate has passed a bill that would recommend students learn cursive by the end of fifth grade, about six months after the state’s House of Representatives passed the legislation.
House Bill 58 mandates the Ohio Department of Education make cursive handwriting part of the English language arts curriculum.
Students must be able to print letters and words legibly by the third grade. By the sixth grade, children are required to know how to write in cursive.
State Representative Andrew Brenner, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in June after it was approved by the House that cursive writing has a range of benefits.
“Cursive writing is so much more than just learning how to sign your name to a check,” Rep. Brenner said in a statement. “For example, studies have shown that learning how to write in cursive helps student learn how to spell and read, especially children with dyslexia. I’m honored that my colleagues agree that cursive is an important and invaluable skill on multiple levels and should be made available to Ohio’s students.”
The Ohio Senate approved the bill 27-2 on Dec. 6.
The original version of the bill required cursive to be taught in schools, but the latest version only mandates that the state Department of Education develop instructional materials to assist in the development of cursive handwriting in the classroom, and it does not require the curriculum to be taught, noted WLWT.
If the change is approved by the House then the bill will be sent to Gov. John Kasich to sign and could be implemented as soon as the 2019-2020 school year.
Comeback for Cursive Nationwide
The Common Core curriculum adopted by many states doesn’t mention handwriting, prompting school districts to cut cursive in favor of other classes. But in the past few years that movement has changed.
At least 14 states have passed laws requiring cursive proficiency in public schools, including Alabama and Louisiana in 2016, reported the Associated Press last year. And New York City schools, the nation’s largest public school system, recommended teaching cursive to students, usually in the third grade.
New York state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, said she decided to push for the recommendation after she encountered an 18-year-old at a voter registration event who couldn’t sign his name correctly.
“I said to him, ‘No, you have to sign here,'” Malliotakis said. “And he said, ‘That is my signature. I never learned script.'”
Besides writing, learning cursive enables students to read historical documents, she said. “If an American student cannot read the Declaration of Independence, that is sad,” she said.
A number of researchers have published studies that support learning cursive. One, Virginia Berninger, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, told WPR that her longitudinal research shows that printing, cursive writing, and typing are each linked with separate brain patterns.
“What we found is that children wrote more words, they wrote them faster and expressed more ideas with paper and pen than with the keyboard. Up to about the sixth grade, there does seem to be an advantage for composing and handwriting,” Berninger said.
