Except when you sign a check — if you even do that anymore — you may hardly use the loops and swirls of cursive.  Many American schools have adjusted, with cursive lessons steadily declining for decades. The Common Core standards adopted by most states in 2010 do not require teaching cursive, and many districts have chosen to spend their limited time, money and resources on core subjects or more modern skills.  But some states are choosing to hold the line, passing laws to make sure cursive doesn’t become a totally lost skill.  “It’s really an art form that personally identifies you,” said Dickie Drake, a state representative in Alabama who introduced a bill requiring schools to teach it. “I think your cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do.”  That bill, named “Lexi’s Law” after Mr. Drake’s granddaughter, was signed by Alabama’s governor, Robert Bentley, in May and it takes effect on Monday. It requires schools to provide cursive instruction by the end of the third grade. While Alabama schools were already required to teach cursive, they must now report proficiency levels to the state at the end of each year. Several other states, including North Carolina and Florida, have passed similar laws in recent years.  The new Alabama law does not include punitive measures for schools with low proficiency rates.  Yes, cursive writing advocates recognize that modern students and adults spend far more time typing into laptops and phones than scribbling pen onto paper. Once used for all official communications, cursive has been taught for 300 years but has been declining in schools since the 1970s, according to a 2010 analysis by the Miami-Dade County Public Schools.  The decreasing use of cursive has led critics to say that the instructional time is better spent elsewhere.  “As we have done with the abacus and the slide rule, it is time to retire the teaching of cursive,” Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, wrote in Room for Debate in 2013.  But advocates maintain that cursive teaches broader motor skills, and that students must be able to read original documents that were printed in cursive.  As times have changed, so has the cursive that is being taught. Schools now tend to favor more stripped-down forms of cursive, like New American Cursive, that do away with the loops and swirls that other generations may have learned, said Sheila Lowe, the president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.  Effective cursive instruction can be woven into other subjects, with instructors dedicating 10 to 15 minutes per day on it, Ms. Lowe said.  “Maybe if they put less emphasis on all those standardized tests,’’ she said, “they’d have more time to do the things that are important.”
Cursive education has been, understandably, declining, but advocates say it teaches broader skills and is needed for the reading of original documents.