Texas’s teen tabs

While the U.S. education system lies smoldering, widely serving as little more than an under-resourced, understaffed daycare for disinterested youth where they can get high and make connects while mommy stocks the shelves at Wal-Mart, a justice of the peace in the San Antonio, Texas, area is trying out a new way to keep kids in class. It has nothing to do with better curricula or teachers able to communicate ideas. Instead, it just shackles students to the classroom via an unremovable ankle-bracelet fitted with a GPS device.

The clever pilot program conceived by Justice Linda Penn will begin with a focus on, she estimates, about 50 students from four San Antonio high schools who have histories of repeated truancy. Though each will be judged on their merits, Penn says most will wear the trackers for six months.

“We’re at a critical point in our time,” says Penn, “where we can either educate or incarcerate.” But the ankle-bracelets don’t provide a better education; it just serves to make sure students are in class. And when they’re not, the authorities can see where they are, 24-hours a day, seven days a week—something that raises serious privacy concerns for the Texas ACLU.

by SCOTT SAXON