Picture two learners and one technology. In one setting, the people teaching them have clear, shared guidance on how AI may be used and how work will be assessed. In the other, silence — every teacher improvising a policy of one. Same tool, very different experience. The difference is not the learner. It is the design of the system around them.
A patchwork is a design, too
When shared guidance is absent, something still decides the practice. Often it is procurement: whichever tool was purchased, with whatever defaults it shipped, quietly becomes the de facto policy. That is a design decision made by omission, and like all such decisions it lands hardest on the learners with the least slack to absorb it.
When guidance is absent, the purchasing decision quietly becomes the pedagogy.
The point is not that one setting is virtuous and another negligent. It is that leaving AI guidance to chance is itself a choice, and equity is what gets spent. A learner who already has support at home navigates the gap; a learner who does not, absorbs it.
The design response
The fix is not a better tool. It is clarity: shared, plain expectations about where AI helps, how work is assessed so that thinking stays visible, and what support the people teaching actually get to make the call. Clarity is an equity issue in the classroom, and it is an equity issue in the guidance that shapes the classroom. Uneven design produces uneven learners, and calls it a difference in ability.