No more driver ed grad requirement? Hurray!

Yesterday morning's Chronicle reported on the evaporation of driver education in high schools and the proposal — by the school board's two student delegates — to end the requirement that SFUSD students have driver ed to graduate from high school.

Yesterday afternoon, I was at a school-related meeting attended by one of the school board's student delegates. I eagerly approached him after the meeting to ask if this year's juniors (the class of '09, including my son) would be freed from that requirement if his proposal passed. He said yes. A few minutes later, another parent at the meeting who had been out of earshot when I spoke to the student delegate approached him to ask the same question — just as eagerly, and accompanied by her Lowell junior.

It's interesting that overall parents enthusiastically call for more and better electives and enrichments — yet I haven't met anyone who thinks the driver ed requirement is anything but a pointless burden. I'm not all that convinced it improves driver safety in the end either, though I haven't seen statistics and I suppose I could be convinced otherwise. A higher driving age would do that (so would an upper-end driving age cutoff, but that's another post for another blog).