Growing up, the kids in my class had this strange, flaky relationship with cursive writing. We started off printing, but by third and fourth grade, our teachers made it clear that we had to learn cursive.
After all, they said, it was the only style of writing that our teachers would accept from here on out.
However, that generally wasn't the case. Whether we liked writing in cursive or not, we found that most of our teachers didn't care how we wrote assignments as long as they could read our answers.
My experiences seem common and cursive has largely fallen out of fashion, but as far as the Texas Board of Education is concerned, that's not happening without a fight.