For Teachers and Admin: Why is penmanship being eliminated from school?

I do not find that it is being removed from the schools around me.

However - things *are* being removed. There is only so much time in the day - and it is easy to see why anything is being removed from the curriculum. Look to the news. A mistake is being made in education policy based on politics. (not republican vs democrat - rather general "easy way out" lets improve the schools talking points)

When we begin simply defining the mission of schools as a singular item - test scores - things begin to get removed. Since "A Nation at risk" in the 80s, politicians, media have called for a focus on test scores. We have changed quite a bit since then - rethinking standards, use of time during the class, NCLB...

Whether it be sports, extra curriculars, electives, arts, penmanship - something has to give way for more time preparing for tests.

We as a society have decided to avoid the complex reasoning for some kids being unsuccessful in school and assigning blame rather than dealing with societal issues.

Penmanship is not being eliminated from schools. At my school, we still have handwriting class once a week. I work at a school for children with learning disabilities and a lot of them actually have fine motor difficulties. In extreme cases, we encourage some of our students to focus on keyboarding because their handwriting is really illegible. Otherwise we encourage all of our students to do their best with handwriting and teach them cursive as well. I have a lot of students coming from other schools in which they have been taught handwriting as well.

If handwriting is being eliminated from some schools, I would think it would be to a lack of funding and increased pressure on standardized tests. Handwriting is not scored on standardized tests so if you want to be able to "pass" the tests and be a "successful" school in accordance to No Child Left Behind, than Reading and Math is really what needs to be focused on. There schools that are no longer teaching science or social studies because of these high stakes testing - those subjects I think are far more important than handwriting.

So it's an art, and should be pursued by artists. The rest of us can get by with scrawls on paper if we have to, or - better - text via keyboard.