Texas can force students to wear locator chips

[Damen]

This assumes that

A. Most teenagers are smart enough to do that with their phones without utterly trashing them, and

B. That most teenagers wouldn't sooner die than part with their precious phones.

Teens are smarter than old farts like us give them credit for.

[Witchyjoshy]

This assumes that

A. Most teenagers are smart enough to do that with their phones without utterly trashing them, and

B. That most teenagers wouldn't sooner die than part with their precious phones.

Teens are smarter than old farts like us give them credit for.

We liked to think that when we were teenagers.

Regardless, while I'm sure there are many quite capable teenagers who will most likely bypass this in a nutshell, there will be just as many too absorbed into their little worlds of entitlement.  Instead of doing something about it, they'll whine about it on facebook/twitter, make a group, and talk about how hard they have it because of the locator chips, and whenever anyone gives them advice, they'll reply with "BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND"

[ScrappyB]

Ripping out the GPS or disabling CarrierIQ wouldn't do that much good anyway, since there are several ways to track a person's location using a cell phone and one of them uses cell tower triangulation. Basically, when a phone is in contact with multiple towers (which it almost always is) the carrier can track the phone's location by measuring the signal strength from each tower. That's how they find dumbphones with no software or GPS capability.

[dpareja]

I personally prefer the low-tech method of "leave the cell phone off unless you actually need to use it".

[Auggziliary]

This assumes that

A. Most teenagers are smart enough to do that with their phones without utterly trashing them, and

B. That most teenagers wouldn't sooner die than part with their precious phones.

Teens are smarter than old farts like us give them credit for.

We liked to think that when we were teenagers.

Regardless, while I'm sure there are many quite capable teenagers who will most likely bypass this in a nutshell, there will be just as many too absorbed into their little worlds of entitlement.  Instead of doing something about it, they'll whine about it on facebook/twitter, make a group, and talk about how hard they have it because of the locator chips, and whenever anyone gives them advice, they'll reply with "BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND"

I don't think using the phones would be a good idea. Knowing the people at my high school a lot of them would steal the phones and hide them somewhere as a prank all the time.

[Distind]

I personally prefer the low-tech method of "leave the cell phone off unless you actually need to use it".

If you want that to work, pop out the battery. Some can still be tracked despite being 'off'

That said,a nyone tracking my poor phone would think I never left my house.

[dpareja]

I personally prefer the low-tech method of "leave the cell phone off unless you actually need to use it".

If you want that to work, pop out the battery. Some can still be tracked despite being 'off'

Fair point. That said, I'm not too concerned, and my phone's also pretty old, maybe old enough not to be traceable while off.

[mellenORL]

After carefully reading the article again, I come away with a really sneaking suspicion that this whole debacle may have come out of a clever little bit of backroom lobbying and salesmanship by a Texas-based RFID system design/install company owner.

Texas law counts a student present for purposes of distributing state aid to education funds based on the number of pupils in the classroom at the start of the day. Northside said it was losing $1.7 million a year due to students loitering in the stairwells or chatting in the hallways.

Why is the Texas school funding statute requiring such a very specific means of accounting - within a classroom and at only a certain time of day - for the student head count/roll call data to be gathered and considered valid to qualify for magnet school funding per capita? Is there really any compelling reason to deny funding if it were simply based on a regular "home room" roll call account data, like it is in every fucking magnet school ever?

Also, if the bullshit answer is, "The RFID system will prevent fraud". What fraud? Do they really think that the money spent to fund such a fine high school is gonna be trolled by huckster teachers and admins? And if they did think that, for real, then what would prevent said hucksters from goofing the system with identity theft-based requests for extra RFIDs? I mean, what the fuck is the purpose of this? Other than to make money for whichever RFID installation company won the contract?

When I was in high school in the mid seventies, it was also at the equivalent today of a magnet school, and we had roll call at home room at about 10:15am every school day. This was all done by hand, and the homeroom data was totaled by the main office within an hour. If a student skipped home room to go fuck off, they got called up to the office later, because every single class room period had attendance noted by the teacher and turned in, too. If you showed up for even just one class, you got counted as attending, that class data would be looked through to catch "skips", and you would be written up for skipping all the other classes, and got shit loads of grief for it.

So why is it suddenly necessary to go all high tech for accounting attendance when it has been done accurately since my great grandmother's time?