ABSTRACT
Educational technologies, and the systems of schooling in which they are deployed, enact particular ideologies about what is important to know and how learners should learn. As Artificial Intelligence—in education and beyond—may contribute to inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities, approaches have been developed to evaluate and mitigate AI’s harmful impacts. However, we argue in this chapter that the dominant paradigm of evaluating fairness on the basis of performance disparities in AI models is inadequate for confronting the systemic inequities that educational AI systems (re)produce. We draw on lenses of structural injustice informed by critical theory and Black feminist scholarship to critically interrogate several widely studied and adopted categories of educational AI; and we explore how they are bound up in and reproduce historical legacies of structural injustice and inequity, regardless of the parity of their models’ performance. We close with alternative visions for a more equitable future for educational AI.
