2026/01/30 by Tiera Tanksley, Brian Cabral · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Critical Race Theory in Education #Education Discipline and Inequality #Digital Education and Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.3390/youth6010012
openalex publication_date 2026/01/30 · openalex created_date 2026/02/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Believed by many to be the “silver bullet” that will bring an end to educational inequality, AI technologies continue to proliferate within schools and classrooms, promising to bolster academic achievement, spark student engagement, and ensure campus safety while lessening the burden of overworked and systemically underpaid teachers. Despite this hype, a growing body of critical research is revealing that many of the AI technologies used in schools are rife with algorithmic biases that exacerbate, rather than remediate, educational inequity for historically marginalized students. We extend the work of scholars who have called attention to the rise of tech-mediated racism and the New Jim Code to consider how the proliferation of AI technologies into K-12 schools has worked to hide, speed up, and automate educational inequities for Black students, giving rise to a techno-educational carceral apparatus. To do so, we analyze youth interviews, youth-generated video blogs, and weekly journal reflections of 46 Black students that participated in a critical technology summer course.