6/7/97

Confessions of a driving instructor

    At last, an answer to the conundrum that has baffled me for years: when a driving instructor is tested, who drives?
    Now I know. Nobody.
    Driving instructors are not tested.
    "Never," says Nira Ben-David, a Jerusalem instructor. "In my 12 years doing this work, no supervisor has ever checked to see if I can teach. They only have statistics: how many of my students pass or fail.
    "In the country's entire history, once, I think in 1991, teachers were given a four-hour refresher course. They don't really know the new laws."    
    That's not the worst of it.
    "There are two ways to become a teacher: either you spend thousands of shekels and take a three-year course, or you qualify after a year's experience as a tester -- which costs nothing and requires no training.
    "To become a tester, it's sufficient to spend a week observing another tester. After a year he gets, for free, a license to be an instructor. Without learning. Without knowing how to teach. It's ridiculous: of course, most people say why should I spend three years and NIS 10,000 for the course?"
    Now we come to the worst of it.
    The latest driver's ed scam -- in which testers and teachers in Haifa took payoffs to put murderously unfit truck drivers on the road -- followed similar scandals about five and 10 years ago in Jerusalem, proving not enough was done to overhaul a system that, everyone agrees, stinks.
    However, Ben-David gives some credit. "One of the best things the ministry did was to improve the level of driving, and the way driving is taught -- making the tests harder, forcing students to take more lessons and acquire more knowledge."
    "Yeah, changes were made after the last scandal," says highly-respected Jerusalem instructor Shmuel Berg. "The changes made things worse. The new testers were not professional, untrained. And because of the controversy, they were afraid to let anyone get a license. Testing was made much harder, and as a result, many, many students failed. You had to be an expert Egged driver to pass a test.
    "So when people fail again and again, naturally, they look for another option." Especially when they have to wait weeks or months before their next test.
    You'd have to be nuts to endure the nuisance of lessons and tests if a well-placed bribe can get you into the fast lane -- especially of you're a bad driver with no hope of passing the test.
    Is that why Israeli drivers are so bad?
    Ben-David, who specializes in women student drivers (no jokes, please), does a U-turn. "This will surprise you: they're really not so bad. Because the tests are much harder now, they're better than new drivers used to be."
    Or, perhaps, they used to be a lot worse. "When I was a new driver, 20 years ago," Ben-David recalls, "my test was a joke. It was after seven lessons of 25 minutes each, and I passed my first test. I couldn't drive uphill, I didn't learn highway driving, or even night driving. I couldn't drive, yet I passed." Now, the minimum is 28 40-minute lessons, and a much harder testing procedure. "Another incredible thing: drivers aren't retested. Ever."
     "I wouldn't say Israelis are bad drivers," Berg concurs. "We have a nervous temperament, we worry about a thousand things. And the roads are bad." The worst drivers, he says, are the cabbies.
    Both Ben-David and Berg (the latter is a pseudonym) vehemently insist they would never accept bribes. "Never even been offered one," says Ben-David with a laugh. 
    "Thank God, I can afford not to," says Berg. "But I truly can't say what I would do if I needed money and someone offered me a lot to get him through. A tester who has a 5,000 shekel overdraft and he's offered 20,000? He won't refuse."
    Not necessarily. Ben-David recalls hearing of one case where "a student offered a bribe to the tester, who drove him directly to the police station." Taught him a good lesson.
    Another shady practise is kablanut (lessons on a contractual basis), whereby teachers accept a lump sum to get the student through the ordeal, no matter how many hours are needed.
    Obviously, teachers won't do this for a bad student who would require many lessons -- unless the agreed sum is exorbitant. Kablanut is usually arranged for better students who don't want to bother with 28 lessons -- or more, following what is usually automatic first-time test failure. (Berg estimates not more than 5 percent of students pass on the first attempt.)
    With this arrangement, the teacher hurries the student through to the test, and then bribes the tester to facilitate the rest. "Sometimes the student doesn't even know the tester was bribed," Ben-David says. She is quick to assure that "only a very small percentage of teachers do this. As far as I know, since the scandal of a few years ago, it's not done anymore in Jerusalem."
    She claims many good instructors are driven out of the trade by a flood of incompetents. "Three years ago, there were only 150 teachers in Jerusalem. Now, there are 400."
    Berg and Ben-David, in separate interviews, both said that palm-greasing is much more prevalent in the Arab sector, where it is not perceived as a crime of corruption, as much as it is a common way of life. In addition, Berg says, Arabs feel disadvantaged in their chances of passing a test, which increases the bakshish incentive.
    "Arabs might offer NIS 20,000, or even more. Jews, a lot less, maybe NIS 1,000 or NIS 5,000. Arabs have less confidence in themselves, and in the system," Berg says.
    "And besides, bribery is legal to them, even up to the highest levels of society.
    "Once, in Ramallah, my car broke down," he recalls. "A student came to my rescue, getting my car repaired at considerable expense -- and he refused to accept payment. I understood. I threatened to report him to police unless he allowed me to pay for the repairs. He didn't understand what he'd done wrong."
    Testers are vulnerable, he explains. They are poorly paid, with no job security. "About eight years ago, the ministry thought they could solve the bribery problem by hiring testers on a contract basis, taking away their job security. But it had the opposite effect: testers felt that if they could lose their jobs at any time, they might as well get out of it what they could."
    A tester's decision to pass or fail, which to a great extent is subjective and can be based on a nitpicky judgment, is crucial to the students. The lure of a windfall is too easy. The risk is low. 
    "Once you do it, once you take a bribe, you're in someone else's hands," says Berg. "And it becomes a habit. By word of mouth, others come expecting the same deal, and you can't say no."
    His solution: put the testing process on to the free market. "You can trust people to be honest more if they're working in the private sector. The testers would be paid a much better salary. They'd be afraid of losing their jobs."
    There's keen competition among driving schools and their mostly freelance teachers. "You can get a reputation for too many failed students. Basically, there's pressure to put bad drivers on the roads to get more students," Berg charges.
    "Instructors are not supposed to be friendly with testers, so that testers won't ease up on a student as a favor to the instructor," Ben-David explains. "But there's a lot of protektzia involved, especially with instructors who used to be testers."
   Which brings us to instructor Michael Aviv.
    "I paid bribe money. I had to, or my students would have failed." Aviv (not his real name) was arrested in the 1985 scandal, in which tester Moshe Shaked went to the police and turned state's witness, incriminating half a dozen instructors he had coerced.
    Two teachers were imprisoned; Aviv got off with three months of community service.
    "Shaked was really the only tester demanding bribes. He used to fail everybody, and then when he came to me asking for a 'loan,' I understood. It wasn't very much, really: I paid him 500 shekels -- not from the students themselves, but from my own pocket."
    His reputation for student-success was at stake, Aviv says. "He had me against the wall. If I hadn't paid him off, he would have failed all my students. I saw he could screw them over."
    Aviv is still teaching. And Shaked?
    Well, what do you suppose happens to a corruption master, blackmailer and big-time fink?
     "He stabbed people in the back, sent 'em to jail; he should be in the garbage." Aviv sneers. "But he became a policeman."
    No!
    "Yeah. A cop. They rewarded him for cooperating. Now he works in the Jerusalem police, in the minorities division, in charge of Arabs." 

THERE IS one overlooked alternative for the frustrated student: faith in God -- or more accurately, faith in Zelig.
    Zelig is a friend of mine, Orthodox with a delightful iconoclastic bent. He recently told me of a woman from his office who had failed six driving tests. She was about to take her seventh, and she was frantic.
    "I'll pray for you," he told her solemnly, masking the twinkle in his eye, "and I guarantee you'll pass."
    What do you know, she passed.
    Next day, she came to him with a look of reverential awe. She pulled him aside. Breathlessly, she said: "There are others, you know..."
    If he had any moxie, he could make a fortune. Can you just see it? The Baba Zelig, patron saint of student drivers.