Is cursive writing still taught in Georgia schools?

GEORGIA, USA — Is cursive making a comeback in Georgia? Well, sort of, it’s actually evolving. Here’s what we found. 

New and more defined cursive standards were recently added to the 2025-2026 school year for state standards. It states that students must learn how to read and write in cursive for third, fourth and fifth grades. 

As the new standards were added, a packet provides instructional guidance and resources for teaching cursive.

This shift reflects Georgia’s renewed commitment to cursive as a foundational literacy skill that supports both communication and comprehension,” a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Education stated. The role of cursive writing in Georgia’s English Language Arts standards has steadily evolved from a minimal reference to a clearly articulated set of expectations.

But as many states adopted the Common Core State Standards, cursive disappeared for some states in 2010 and 2011. According to the National Education Association, dated in 2022, it appears that more than 20 states, including Georgia, require cursive writing.

With many states not teaching cursive in schools, an age-old debate has resurfaced several times across the country, wondering if it should be brought back to all schools in the nation. 

According to the Georgia Department of Education, there was only a period of time when cursive standards weren’t adopted, which was in 2005, when the Georgia Performance Standards had no mentions of cursive. 

The earliest reference to cursive in Georgia history is in 1984, when the state adopted the Quality Core Curriculum, which noted that second graders should “begin to recognize cursive letters.” 

After 2005, there were two mentions of cursive adopted in 2010 and 2015, which only required writing legibly in cursive in the third and fourth grades, while leaving spaces in between letters and words in a sentence. 

The latest standards, which will be implemented on July 1 and were adopted in 2023, include reading a variety of texts written in cursive, producing texts using cursive, and using the appropriate spacing throughout the body of a text when writing it.