If you ask around, you’ll find plenty of people who shrug off driver’s education as a formality, something you sit through to check a box, not something that actually changes how safely a new driver ends up behind the wheel. For a long time, even the research seemed to back that up. But the most comprehensive study ever done on the subject tells a very different story, and it’s a big part of why William’s Walk and Maxwell Driving School built Steps to Steering: 901 in the first place.
Why Driver’s Ed Fell Out of Favor
Back in the early 1980s, a study raised doubts about whether driver’s education actually made new drivers safer. States took that skepticism seriously, and many pulled funding for driver’s ed programs, and some insurance companies even stopped offering discounts for completing a course. For three decades, that early doubt shaped policy and funding decisions across the country, even as generations of new drivers kept getting licensed with wildly different levels of preparation.
The Study That Changed the Conversation
In 2015, researchers Duane Shell and Ian Newman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Prevention Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse set out to actually test that assumption at scale. They tracked the driving records of more than 151,000 Nebraska teens over eight years, comparing two groups: teens who completed a formal driver’s education course, and teens who instead logged 50 hours of supervised practice driving with a parent or another adult.
The results were clear. Teens who skipped formal driver’s education were:
- 75% more likely to receive a traffic ticket
- 24% more likely to be involved in a fatal or injury crash
- 16% more likely to be in any crash at all
Broken down further, 11.1% of teens who completed driver’s ed were involved in a crash during the study period, compared to 12.9% of those who didn’t. For crashes involving injury or death, it was 2.1% versus 2.6%. Those percentage-point gaps might look small at first glance, but multiplied across thousands of new drivers every year, they represent a meaningful number of crashes, tickets, injuries, and lives that formal instruction likely prevented.
The researchers were direct about why this matters: teen crash and fatality rates are highest between ages 16 and 18, which is exactly the window driver’s education is designed to prepare young people for. A parent riding along for 50 hours is valuable, but it isn’t a substitute for structured instruction in hazard recognition, right-of-way judgment, and the kind of decision-making that comes up in situations most new drivers haven’t faced yet.
Why This Matters for Memphis
This research is the foundation underneath Steps to Steering: 901. We didn’t build it because driver’s education sounded like a nice idea; we built it because the data shows formal instruction measurably reduces the exact outcomes we’re working to prevent: crashes, injuries, and the kind of split-second mistakes that change a family’s life forever.
For many Shelby County families, cost is a barrier standing between a teen and a real driver’s education course. That’s the gap our scholarship is designed to close, making sure that a student’s access to quality instruction isn’t determined by what their family can afford, at the exact moment in their life when that instruction matters most.
The Takeaway
Driver’s education isn’t a formality. It’s one of the most evidence-backed tools we have for keeping new drivers, and everyone sharing the road with them, safer. If you know a Memphis-Shelby County Schools family with a teen approaching driving age, this is a good moment to point them toward the scholarship program. And if you’re in a position to support it, every contribution helps put real, structured instruction in front of a new driver who might not otherwise get it.
Learn more about Steps to Steering: 901 a William’s Walk and Maxwell Driver Education Scholarship at https://williams-walk.com/steps-to-steering-901/.