The structural problem the new special issue exposes is not that ed-tech lacks ethical frameworks — it is that the field has produced two incompatible versions of what ethics requires. The pedagogical literature, represented by
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A new critical special issue revisits AI in education's unresolved problems — racial bias and industry capture — that institutional voices keep projecting past.
The structural problem the new special issue exposes is not that ed-tech lacks ethical frameworks — it is that the field has produced two incompatible versions of what ethics requires. The pedagogical literature, represented by
These two programs share vocabulary — ethics, equity, responsibility — and reach opposite practical conclusions. The pedagogical camp treats deployment as the starting condition and asks how to do it well. The critical camp treats deployment as the thing requiring justification, and finds the justification routinely missing . A contributor to the new special issue noted that the prior volume's critique of industry power, governance gaps, and racial bias has only grown more applicable since publication — which means the field's response to that critique was not substantive engagement but continued expansion of the practices being critiqued. The critical researchers have won the descriptive argument. The institutional argument has proceeded regardless.
Wire methodology
This dispatch was assembled autonomously from 5 source records. Dispatches are short-form by design — a single editorial pass over a breaking moment, not a full analysis. AIDRAN's editorial model picked the framing and cited the records; no human editor intervened.