PANEL 5 | OVERVIEW

In what ways do digital technologies create new opportunities as well as new challenges for ethical decision making by educators and policy makers? How should we think about innovations such as algorithmic policy implementation, automated content analysis of student work, digital surveillance of students’ and teachers’ movements (e.g. RFIDs, facial recognition, eye tracking), integration of big data sets in education with social welfare or criminal justice data, AI-generated text production by ChatGPT, and hyper personalized learning platforms? 

Are the questions raised by these technologies simply old ones in new wrapping, or does the digital revolution raise legitimately novel ethical risks and affordances? Furthermore, to what extent can answers to ethical questions about algorithmic decision-making, big data use, artificial intelligence, and large language processing in other fields be applied directly to education, and to what extent does our ethical analysis need to be education-specific? 

PANELISTS

Benjamin Herold

Spencer Journalism Fellow, Columbia University and Staff Writer, Education Week 

Sarah Igo

Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives, Vanderbilt University 

Elizabeth Laird

Director, Equity in Civic Technology, Center for Democracy and Technology

Tiera Chanté Tanksley

Assistant Professor of Equity, Diversity and Justice, School of Education, University of Colorado Boulder 

MODERATOR

Carrie James

Senior Research Associate & Principal Investigator, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of Design Based Implementation Research, Democratic Knowledge Project, Harvard University

PANEL 6 | OVERVIEW

The idea of triaging students (or teachers, schools, or districts) is anathema to educators and policy makers; the idea that “every child can learn” is a fundamental ethical commitment within education. At the same time, educators and policy makers both ration and triage on a regular basis. This was starkly on display during COVID, as school openings and closings, services for children with special needs, distribution of hotspots vs. worksheets, and live vs. asynchronous vs. canceled instruction were distributed in highly inequitable and disturbing, even baffling, ways. 

But even under non-pandemic conditions and comparatively well-resourced conditions of universal school access, educators decide to allow some students to keep their headphones on and their heads down on the desk so long as they don’t bother others, to assign strong teachers to advanced classes and newbies or “burnouts” to the “low-level” classes, to spend resources on the “bubble kids” whose scores are just over or under a high-stakes cutoff and neglect those who are reliably on one side of the line or the other, to close schools that have been deemed “failing” or “underutilized,” to expel a child who seems to threaten other students’ well-being. How can work on triage and rationing in bioethics and medical ethics shed light on triage in education? What insights are gained, if any, from fleshing out the concept of triage in educational ethics? 

PANELISTS

Jennifer L. Jennings

Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University 

Govind Persad

Assistant Professor, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver

Khalya Hopkins

Specialized Student Support Lead, New York City Department of Education

MODERATOR

Sigal Ben-Porath

Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

PANEL 7 | OVERVIEW

Philosophers have been concerned for centuries with the question of who should have the authority to direct children’s learning: the family, the state, or the child him/her/themselves. In contemporary times, however, a much broader range of actors exercises significant power over the context, conditions, and circumstances of children’s learning. These include large textbook and assessment publishers such as Pearson, philanthropies such as Gates and Broad, multinational organizations such as UNHCR for millions of migrant children, teachers’ unions, and many others. 

How should we think about the ethical dimensions of these distributions of power? What are the philosophical and practical implications of expanding the analytic state-family-child “triangle” to include these other actors? 

PANELISTS

Bruce Fuller

Professor of Education and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Emma Saunders-Hastings

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University 

Sarah Dryden-Peterson

Professor of Education and Founder and Director of REACH, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Jessica Tang

President, Boston Teachers Union 

MODERATOR

Michael Hand

Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Birmingham