My 15-year-old daughter had just completed the first portion of her driver’s ed class (including six hours of on-the-road training) when she asked to drive home from her softball practice.

After a moment of mom-whiplash — my baby! — I shook it off, knowing this needed to become the new normal. Michigan, where we live, requires drivers under 18 who get a learner’s permit to log a whopping 50 hours of driving practice time with a parent in the car before they can qualify for a license at age 16.

So as I adjusted to being in the passenger seat, my daughter pulled into traffic, and I said, “We’ll need to turn left at the next light.” She then steered the car as far left as possible, so that we’d soon be face-to-face with oncoming traffic.

Panicking while trying to keep my voice calm, I guided her back toward the street’s central turn lane and thought, “Why, after completing a course on driving, doesn’t she have a firmer handle on the rules of the road?”

The answer is that, over time, states have shifted the responsibility of educating new teen drivers from public school systems, which used to offer free classes and driving lessons during the summer, to parents and private driving schools.

And while research has demonstrated that graduated licensing systems — like the one we have in Michigan — net positive results, in terms of teens’ reduced crash rates, it can nonetheless be an emotionally fraught and stressful process for teens and parents alike.

This led me to wonder: How exactly did we get here? And how might both my teenager and I get through this unnerving moment with our relationship intact?

The Evolution of Driver’s Ed

Back when the Model T made its debut on American roadways, in the early 20th century, licenses weren’t required in most states, and driver training was an unregulated mishmash, with free instruction offered by car dealerships and organizations like the YMCA.

As automobiles became cheaper and more common, adolescents climbed behind the wheel in large numbers — leading statistician and actuarial scientist Albert Wurts Whitney to argue, in his 1928 doctoral thesis, that high schools should offer a driving class as part of their curriculum. (Whitney also authored Man and the Motor Car in 1936, which became a widely used textbook.)

In 1934, Amos Neyhart, a Penn State University professor known as “the father of high school driver education,” developed the first curriculum in State College, Pennsylvania, and similar programs quickly appeared across the country — which is why many of us learned about the rules of the road from an algebra teacher looking for some supplemental summer income.

The practice became so pervasive that in the 1970s, a whopping 95% of eligible students across America took a driver’s education course, mostly for free via the public school system. But soon, the course of driver's education would be seismically altered.

Some published studies in the early 1980s argued that driver’s education courses were ineffective (a stance that’s still debated). As this critique took hold — and state and school budgets became increasingly strained — driver’s education found itself on the chopping block throughout the 1990s and aughts. When Michigan stopped requiring schools to offer driver’s ed in 1998, for example, the school system in Southfield — a Detroit suburb which then had a population of nearly 80,000 people — immediately slashed $63,486 from its budget by eliminating driver’s ed.

So almost as quickly as school-centered driver’s ed had become the norm, it all but vanished from the American landscape. Consequently, for-profit private driving academies, which often charge customers hundreds of dollars in what is now a $1.3 billion industry, became the default option.

In a twist we all could have seen coming, the percentage of teens who now take driver’s ed and obtain a permit/license has plummeted. Researchers at the University of Michigan recently reported that the number of American 18-year-olds with a driver’s license dropped from 80% in 1983 to 61% in 2012, with the trend continuing downward.

This is only partly due to the removal of driver’s education from schools, of course. “Driving used to be [teens’] only independent outlet in life,” said Dr. Frances Jensen, Department of Neurology Chair at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Teenage Brain. “Now the internet has taken over, and you can have a completely independent social life virtually.”

Indeed, for most of the 20th century, teens had viewed a driver’s license as a ticket to personal freedom, but thanks to the ease and ubiquity of online communications — as well as the widespread availability of services like Lyft and Uber or cheaper and greener options like bikes and public transit — the urge to drive among teens has, in the interim, been neutralized. Plus, teens who suffer from anxiety, pandemic-related or otherwise, are often among those who delay or opt out of learning to drive.

Even so, small number of school systems have labored to bring free, school-centered driving instruction back, recognizing that not all families can afford or have access to driving academies. Yet they are, and will likely continue to be, rare.

“It’s a major financial commitment, and logistically, it’s not easy to put together, either,” said Kurt Ottum, a teacher in Washington State’s Bellingham Public Schools, which reinstated free driver education for students (as an elective course) in 2018. “I don’t think there’s anybody else in the state of Washington that is offering it for free, and there are very few school districts that are offering it even as a paid course. It’s hard to find instructors, both behind-the-wheel staff and certified teachers for it, and the schooling for it is hard as well. It’s not a class you can just take at any college.”

Plus, just as most parents had to start seeking alternative means to get their teens road-ready, states also started enacting graduated driver’s licensing systems (GDLS), wherein teens first get a learner’s permit, and then must then observe certain rules and restrictions before they can test for a driver’s license. Florida was the first to adopt a GDLS in 1996; a total of 31 states adopted similar laws by 2000, and the other 19 followed suit by 2006.

GDLS are effective: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that “the most comprehensive GDL programs are associated with reductions of about 20 percent in 16-year-old drivers’ fatal crash involvement rates” — which is to say, the more teens get supervised practice, with restrictions, the safer they’ll ultimately be behind the wheel.