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18 States Tie Drivers License to School Work

In Arkansas, you've got to have a C average -- certified by your school -- to get your driver's license. In North Carolina, you have to be passing at least five classes.

On the other hand, there's Wisconsin, which allows but doesn't require a judge to suspend the license of any high school truant who has five unexcused absences in a semester.

Those are among the 18 states that tie driving privileges in some way to either school performance or attendance. Many passed laws to that effect in the 1990s.

Minnesota would join that club if the Legislature passes an initiative announced Tuesday by Gov. Tim Pawlenty to suspend the driving privileges of students who either drop out of school or chalk up unexcused absences totaling 20 percent of a quarter, semester or school year.

The idea is to keep kids in school and showing up in class by striking at the heart of a teenager's social experience -- the driver's seat.

But across the nation, many states don't know how such laws are working. That's because it's tough to separate license suspension laws from all the other efforts to keep kids in school.

"They're virtually impossible to track," said Kathy Christie, director of the information clearinghouse with the Education Commission of the States, a Denver think tank. "The state might be doing 10 to 20 other things to reduce truancy and dropouts. . . . It's kind of like a cold. You blast it with medicine, vitamin C and fluids. How do you know what did the trick? Or maybe all of them together did the trick."

Still, Minnesota education officials found what they consider to be encouraging statistics in Florida -- whose law is the model for the Pawlenty plan. According to Minnesota Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke, Florida's graduation rate has risen 7.7 percent in the five years since the law took effect. Although she conceded that it's tough to attribute that increase to the driver's license law with so many other stay-in-school efforts in the mix, she said Florida officials have been encouraged.

"They said the message is really starting to get out," she said. "People are understanding that they mean business."

Yecke said her statistics show that Florida suspended the licenses of 1,300 students last year either for dropping out or missing too many classes. But statistics from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles show far higher totals. According to Donald Klein, a Highway Department operations and management consultant, there were more than 9,100 such suspensions last year. Even so, Klein said, it's tough to tell whether the law is working.

"You can't say the program is effective because we have . . . other programs used to keep kids in school," he said.

West Virginia, where a no school, no license law went into effect in 1988, is often credited as being the first state to link school attendance to driving privileges. The number of suspensions for dropping out of school or piling up too many unexcused absences has dropped over the years, according to Mary Jane Lopez, spokeswoman for the West Virginia Department of Transportation motor vehicles division. According to Lopez, license suspensions have gone from 791 in the 2000-01 school year to 589 last year. She had no figures for graduation rates.

Despite the lack of clear evidence, the Education Commission of the States' Christie thinks such laws can have the desired effect just by raising the profile of the absent-student problem.

"What it does is raise the visibility of attendance in the public consciousness," she said. "Driver's licenses do matter to teenagers. It may indeed be the thing that keeps kids going to school, but there's no real documentation of that."


— Norman Draper
Other states use licenses to steer teens to school
Star Tribune
2003-10-16
http://www2.startribune.com/stories/462/4156810.html

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