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November 30, 2006
CHICAGO TRIB PUBLISHES DRIVER ED EXPOSE
Young drivers in Illinois and across the country are getting as little as two hours or less of on-road experience in their driver ed classes, the Chicago Tribune reports, even though “six hours of instructor-supervised driving is the benchmark for driver's education across the U.S.” It found that, “Even an hour of practice on a street satisfies Illinois' driver's education requirements. Of the 10 states with the largest school populations, only Florida has a weaker standard.”
It found the driver's education system “in disarray across the U.S.--a patchwork of guidelines, with little monitoring in some states, including Illinois, and little consensus on what works best in training teens to be safe. The system, for the most part, has remained the same since 1949…”
According to the article, classroom work and simulators have nudged aside on-road driving exposure for high school students. And, pointing up an anomaly that was first documented in Insurance Institute for Highway Safety studies in the 1970s, the paper noted that the effectiveness of driver ed in reducing crashes is doubtful. “In the 1960s, as the federal government poured millions into driver's education, researchers began studying whether the program yielded safe drivers. They were unable to establish a link. In 1981, federal funding dried up, leaving a financially strapped system lacking continuity… Meanwhile, car crashes have been the No. 1 killer of teens for decades, taking 5,000 to 6,000 young lives each year.”
The paper pointed out that, “A National Transportation Safety Board forum in 2003 urged the U.S. Department of Education and the National Highway Safety Administration to come up with a model driver training curriculum. Three years later, there has been no meaningful progress toward that goal…”
Posted by MVHAP at November 30, 2006 07:40 PM