Why have public schools stopped teaching cursive writing in elementary and middle school? What led to the discontinuation of these courses?

The need to teach keyboarding at the elementary level.

Keyboarding, formerly called typing, was traditionally a vocational course in the high school curriculum. But at that time, a computer was a huge machine that took up a whole room, or even a whole building for a very powerful one (for the time). I took it as a junior, and I had to argue for it, since I was on the Academic Diploma track, and typing was on the Vocational Diploma track. In my experience, I have used the skills I developed in my typing class more than any other skills I learned in high school—after all, I am using them now, and I haven’t used my algebra skills in months.

The development of the personal computer changed the landscape of literacy. Using computers to teach literacy became usual even in the primary grades. Typing is actually faster than handwriting in cursive, so that students (like me) who had horrible cursive could instead type something quickly that was easier to read than very bad handwriting. The time used in third grade, when cursive was often first presented, could be better spend teaching kids how to “touch type” quickly and easily.

I happen to think that the main thing we need to teach in the primary grades is a slightly less rigid and awkward style of manuscript (printing) writing by hand. The need to teach children two entirely different kinds of handwriting is counterproductive. The current manuscript styles, often called “ball and bat” printing because it is based on assembling letters in separate straight or curved strokes is highly inefficient, and there are several styles of writing that are not as fancy as cursive, but are much easier to write, as they require fewer lifts of the pencil.