Ask The Instructor

This is coming from an instructor who has been with American Career Tech, Cowtown Driver Training, Longhorn Driving School and Interstate Driver Training. I noticed that there seems to be plenty of initials attached to schools. These associations are there to accredit the school in some why, to give it substantiation to assure the student that the school somehow has gotten things right after all these other schools have cheated their students out of money.

These accreditations mean nothing. It is like putting a "Yeah, it's a Hemi" on the back window of a 1976 AMC Pacer!

A school is only as good as its worst instructor. Good instructors are not rewarded and most of the time the reason a school goes under is because the owner rewarded himself too well. I was the Lead Instructor at Interstate Driver Training and they still owe me about 6 weeks of pay after bouncing a ton of payroll checks. The only reason I stayed even when the school was falling apart was because I was committed to my students.

No matter how a school is set up, it can be a decent school. IDT went from being a decent school to being a lease-to-own set up for a major carrier. I warned the owner but he didn't listen. Once the students found out what they had signed up for, they quit and did something else and never paid back the loan.

Your best assurance for success when it comes to a truck driving school is to find one that has instructors who care about you. Instructors are also the most ignored piece of the puzzle. If a decent instructor sees a school putting one over on a student and says something about it, that instructor will be replaced within a few days.

So like me, the best instructors don't stick with it once they find out what they are involved in. Why would any driver volunteer to cut their pay in half, forfeit their benefits and become an instructor? There may be some good instructors left in the industry, but it is because they are still new at it and have some hope left that they can help people get back to work.

Can you imagine a potential student demanding to know how well the driving school pays their instructors? You would never get another call! Bad instructors get paid the same as good instructors. Good instructors do not get rewarded, they get punished because they have to train the students the bad instructors can't! If you are sitting in a class room watching ancient safety films while the classroom instructor is spending hours drinking coffee and doing other things, it is a pretty good chance you have enrolled in a CDL mill. But even if you have, if there is one decent, caring instructor and you are lucky enough to get him, it's worth it. But good instructors are a tiny minority in the training industry and most school owners wouldn't know a good one if he kicked them in the rear end.