Driver Education All Over The Map

National driver education standards should be adopted so teenagers everywhere receive uniform training before hitting the road on their own, traffic safety experts said Tuesday.

"Without national leadership, everyone has done their own thing," said Allen Robinson, a professor and director of the American Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association, an organization for teachers of drivers education. "We need to clearly define what we want and what outcomes we expect."

Robinson spoke at the start of a two-day meeting sponsored by the National Transportation Safety Board. The gathering was prompted by a Montana crash last January in which three young people and their instructor were killed when a 14-year-old student driver lost control and swerved into oncoming traffic. The driver was among those killed.

Teens make up 6.6 percent of all drivers but are involved in 14 percent of all fatal accidents and 16 percent of all crashes, said NHTSA's Sean McLaurin. A total of 6,724 teens 15 and older died in crashes involving a teen driver in 2002, up from 6,457 in 2001.

Driver education is a hodgepodge, sometimes taught in schools and sometimes by private companies, said retired NHTSA researcher Jim Nichols. Curriculum and teaching requirements vary by state and even by county.

Nichols and others said driver education has improved in the last five years with more states adopting graduated driver's licensing, which requires teens to pass certain stages before they gain new privileges such as driving at night. All but 14 states now have graduated licensing, McLaurin said.

But much more needs to be done, such as reconsidering the common practice of giving teens six hours of supervised driving after 30 hours of classroom training, he said.

"Would you have somebody change the plumbing in your house that had only 30 hours of classroom training and six hours on the job?" McLaurin said. "This is one of the most complex psychomotor skills we will ever learn."

McLaurin said Michigan's driver education program should be the nation's model because it teaches students basic skills, takes them on the road and then returns them to the classroom to discuss the effects of risky driving, distraction, seat belt use and other issues. McLaurin said Michigan has seen drops in teen driving deaths since it began the program in the 1990s, though he did not provide figures.

Robinson said new programs need to take advantage of the Internet and computer-based driving simulators, since older films aren't engaging students anymore. He also said schools should get back into the business of driver education, since they are best equipped to handle students with learning disabilities or other issues that could hamper driving.

According to Nichols, Michigan was the first state to adopt driver education in the mid-1950s. By the late 1960s the government was spending $250 million per year on a national curriculum taught in high schools, Nichols said.

But funding and participation dropped in the 1980s as insurance rates increased and some studies indicated students who took driver education were in accidents as often as students who didn't.