Beyond "Fairness:" Structural (In)justice Lenses on AI for Education
This work highlights a critical gap in AI fairness approaches for education, targeting researchers and practitioners concerned with systemic inequities, though it is incremental in applying existing critical theory to AI.
The paper argues that current fairness evaluations based on performance disparities in AI models are insufficient for addressing systemic inequities in educational AI, and it uses a structural injustice lens to critique how these systems reproduce historical injustices regardless of model parity.
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 technologies -- in education and beyond -- may contribute to inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities, various approaches have been developed to evaluate and mitigate the harmful impacts of AI. However, we argue in this paper 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 a lens of structural injustice informed by critical theory and Black feminist scholarship to critically interrogate several widely-studied and widely-adopted categories of educational AI and 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.