I'd rather be forced to read the cursive writing of any of my four grandparents (only one of whom even graduated high school) than the printing of most high school students today. (I've taught high school recently, so I've spent a lot of time grappling with the problems of modern handwriting trends.)

The legibility problem is caused by a lack of practice in handwriting in general. Cursive has a number of standard forms and a few standard variations even in very calligraphic scripts. If you use a standard form of cursive well, it's just as legible as printing.

Take a look at public records written before typewriters; for the most part, they're pretty easy to read if you're familiar with standard cursive forms (abbreviations are often more a problem than sorting out what the letters are).

(Btw, I'm not arguing for continuing education in cursive. But the problem of legibility is more about lack of practice in proper handwriting than the particular script used.)

Graphing calculators aren't a useful tool. They're a contrivance that students have to put up with because of other factors.

Namely: they're a small, nearly useless computer that fits in a backpack and can be dropped. They don't do anything that couldn't be done 100x as fast on a netbook. Heck, they don't do anything that couldn't be done better on a PDA or an eBook reader if it has enough juice to play mp3s.