Driving Change: Bringing driver's education back to school

By Michel Shane · Fri Jul 24 2026

Start with the concession, because it is the honest place to begin.

In the early 1980s, the skeptics were right. A federally funded study in DeKalb County, Georgia, found that high school driver's education did not lower crash rates and that licensing teenagers sooner put more of them on the road, not fewer. States read that and pulled their funding. California pulled its funding hardest.

In 1990, about 250,000 students across 250 California high schools learned to drive at school. That same year, the state cut the money. By 2007, seven schools were left. Two hundred fifty down to seven.

But California never took driver's education out of the law; it just took it out of the classroom. The Education Code still orders every district to offer automobile driver education in grades 7 through 12. Not may. Shall. The trick is precise: The law dictates a district must offer the course, but never says the state will pay for it, and it sets no penalty for districts that quietly do not comply. So the mandate floats. The state wrote a right it never funded and never enforced. That is not neglect. It is a way to take credit for a promise while maintaining permission to break it.

The class that failed in 1983 is not the class we would teach now. The country rebuilt how it licenses teenagers: supervised hours, night limits, and passenger restrictions. Inside that modern structure, driver's education stopped being a shortcut to a license and became training that holds. In 2015, a University of Nebraska study of more than 150,000 teen drivers found that those who skipped driver's ed were 24 percent more likely to be in a crash that injured or killed someone, and 75 percent more likely to get a ticket. The subject we abandoned is now one of the few things we can prove works.

We know this. We are simply choosing not to act on it.

A private market has filled the void, turning a survival skill into a product. A family with money buys a good program; a family without it buys nothing. That teenager learns on the road, untrained, in traffic with everyone else. We took a subject the state calls a right and turned it into a purchase. No school treats reading or math that way. We decided the one skill most likely to kill a 16-year-old was the one we would sell instead of teach.

Look at what we offer instead of a classroom. This spring, the federal government's answer to teenagers dying on the road was a distracted-driving ad campaign asking parents to educate their teens. Money for a message. Watch a teenager meet that ad: ten seconds of attention, one second of thought, a swipe, and the next screen erases it. An ad cannot teach a skill, and you do not learn to drive from a billboard. We are funding reminders and calling it safety.

The tools already exist. A student can practice a blind merge 50 times on a simulator, where a mistake costs only a score, until the right reaction is built in before a real curve tests it.

Other states have stopped waiting. Mississippi just made driver's education mandatory in all its schools. Utah is incorporating the stories of teenagers killed on the road into its classes. California's answer last month was to make its driver handbook and videos mobile-friendly. A handbook is not a teacher. It will build a website before it funds a classroom. The DMV's own director called nothing “more important than being safe and knowledgeable” behind the wheel. Good. Then fund the class that builds both, instead of posting a handbook and calling it safety.

Here is the part that removes our last excuse: With federal policy increasingly pushing education mandates back to the local level, no one higher up is coming to solve this. The decision is ours. California already wrote the promise into its code. All that is missing is the will to keep it.

We should build it here, on one of the most demanding roads in the country. Not just because the Pacific Coast Highway is deadly, but because it asks more of a driver than almost any road we have. Blind driveways, cyclists a foot off the line, tourists braking for a view, and 21 miles of curve and speed at once. A program that can ready a teenager for PCH can ready them for any road. Prove it here, and you have proven it anywhere. A district this small and this visible can build the model and hand the blueprint to every district still waiting.

Someone will say we cannot afford it. That is the next conversation, shorter than people think. None of this means schools must buy fleets of cars or hire driving instructors. The pieces already exist. Assembling them, and funding the software licenses and hardware, comes next.

Driver's education is not an extracurricular. The state settled that when it wrote the subject into law as a right. Put it back in school. Treat it like the education it was always meant to be, and teach it where every student can reach it, not just the ones who can pay.

We make room for a hundred things a student may never use, and none for the one that keeps them alive.

The keys are in their hands. What we teach them is the only part we control. No family should have to join The Empty Chair Club because we could not find the will to keep a promise we already wrote into law.

You can reach me at 21mileinmalibu@gmail.com