Arne Duncan spent six years dismantling American education while Obama celebrated him for it.
Now Ron DeSantis is cleaning up the mess.
Florida just put cursive writing back in classrooms – and this time it's the law.
What Duncan and Obama Actually Did
In 2010, Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan used a federal grant program called Race to the Top to push Common Core into schools across the country.
The deal was simple: adopt our standards, get the money.
Cursive writing wasn't in those standards.
The people who wrote Common Core decided keyboards were the future and penmanship belonged in the past.
Forty-one states took the money and dropped cursive.
Florida took the money and dropped cursive.
Within a few years, an entire generation of American kids stopped learning to write it.
What did that actually cost them?
https://twitter.com/Defiantly_Free/status/2046554444788093199?s=20
A Harvard historian named Drew Gilpin Faust found out the hard way. She was teaching an undergraduate seminar on Civil War history when she discovered that two-thirds of her students couldn't read 19th-century handwritten documents at all.
Not the analysis. Not the historical context.
The actual words on the page.
They needed someone to translate what their own history said.
That's what Arne Duncan's education priorities produced.
What DeSantis Just Did About It
Governor DeSantis signed SB 182 on Monday.
Under the new law, Florida public schools must teach cursive from third grade through fifth grade.
By the end of fifth grade, students must demonstrate real proficiency – not exposure, not effort, proficiency.
That means writing upper and lowercase letters correctly, producing legible sentences with proper spacing, reading cursive, and using it in actual assignments.
The same bill requires portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to hang in a prominent place in every public school in the state.
It also creates a mentoring program paying retired and current master teachers up to $3,000 each to work inside Florida's lowest-performing schools and help struggling teachers get better.
https://twitter.com/FLVoiceNews/status/2019205228340371852?s=20
The law takes effect July 1.
Florida Is Part of Something Bigger
Florida isn't alone in fixing this.
Sixteen years after Common Core pushed cursive out of classrooms, 25 states have now passed laws bringing it back.
California – California – put cursive requirements back on the books in 2023.
Pennsylvania passed its own cursive law in February.
State after state is looking at what Arne Duncan's education revolution actually produced and deciding they want no part of it.
Researchers have found that children who learn to write by hand build stronger neural connections for reading and language than children who only type.
Historians have warned for years that a generation that can't read cursive loses direct access to its own past – the Founders' letters, soldiers' journals, the handwritten documents that built this republic.
Common Core didn't modernize education.
It produced a generation that needs an interpreter to read what the men who created this country actually wrote.
The Fight DeSantis Keeps Winning
While Democrat-run states have spent years stripping traditional content out of schools, DeSantis keeps putting it back in.
Cursive writing.
Washington and Lincoln on school walls.
Experienced teachers in failing classrooms.
None of this is controversial to normal Americans.
All of it drives the left absolutely insane – which tells you exactly what they actually want for your children.
Obama called Duncan the man who did more for American education than anyone else.
Duncan called Common Core an "absolute game-changer."
He was right about that part.
It changed an entire generation of American kids.
Just not the way he promised.
DeSantis is changing it back.
Sources:
- Andrea Chu, "DeSantis signs law requiring cursive to be taught in Florida schools," WFTS Tampa Bay, April 22, 2026.
- Brooke Schultz, "The Number of States That Require Schools to Teach Cursive Is Growing," Education Week, November 2024.
- "How Arne Duncan Reshaped American Education and Made Enemies Along the Way," NBC News, January 2016.
- "Cursive Handwriting Is Set for a Comeback in Pennsylvania Schools," Pennsylvania Capital-Star, February 2026.
- Drew Gilpin Faust, "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive," The Atlantic, 2022.
