Los Angeles Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he is moving forward with his venture into artificial intelligence — a platform designed to help students and families navigate the complexities of the district — despite the collapse of the company that designed an AI chatbot.
In his first extensive interview about what happened, the Los Angeles schools chief described a fully functional AI-powered platform that is up and running and owned by the district, with everything but a chatbot in place for now.
But parents and teachers are questioning this characterization, because the platform is not available across the school system and its signature feature is relegated. They said they have no idea how or how well it works, how to access it or what it is supposed to do. Their only information, they said, came from flashy media events.
One parent said she found personal information about her daughter online and questioned the district’s handling of private data, though the district denies any connection between the leaked data and the artificial intelligence project or Boston-based AllHere, the company that designed the chatbot.
The Los Angeles Unified School District said a former district contractor failed to delete private district data (as required) and that this stranded data was exposed through a breach at a different company. The district has not responded in further detail to questions about this breach, including what information was compromised or how many people were affected. No notification has been sent to affected families.
Carvalho has touted the chatbot, named “Ed,” as being able to answer school-related questions from teachers, parents and students by pulling information from across the district’s databases — meaning the automated platform is collecting, processing and sending massive amounts of data from the nation’s second-largest school system.
Officials said the chatbot has been disabled since June 14, when they learned that AllHere had laid off the “vast majority” of its employees, as an AllHere company manager said in an email.
The district had paid AllHere $3 million for work completed on a contract worth up to $6 million over five years.
“I want to be very clear about one thing: what was envisioned and promised — and I own the vision for this, I own that — was actually fulfilled,” Carvalho said.
“Ed is more than just a chatbot,” he added.
Carvalho said the district will determine how to replace AllHere, assess potential risks related to AllHere's collapse and gradually roll out the AI platform across all schools, restoring the chatbot and adding features to the system, which is still a work in progress.
On July 2, investigators working for the school system’s inspector general interviewed Chris Whiteley, AllHere’s former senior director of software engineering, on video, according to a report by The 74, an education news site. Whiteley has described in detail how his former employer allegedly violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies in its handling of student data..
Carvalho said he had no comment on Whiteley's claims, but said the district is not aware of any data breaches involving AllHere.
In published accounts, Whiteley has not alleged that a data breach occurred, only that his former company's practices created inappropriate risk.
AllHere did not respond to a request for comment.
“School of One”
Carvalho emphasized that the Ed platform was created as a vehicle for creating an Individual Acceleration Plan, or IAP, for each student.
In what he called a groundbreaking achievement, Carvalho said an IAP would become a personalized academic strategy. In a TED talk, Carvalho described the effort as a “school of one” for each student.
“Ed was conceived as an individualized acceleration platform that uses all the data we have on students, all the partners we have in terms of curriculum, support, all the attendance data, everything about that child and is able to process that data, analyze it and then generate a plan for that student. AI does that,” Carvalho told The Times.
“The chatbot is just a small feature,” he said. “It is, by the way, the most interesting because it is what people identify as AI, but it is nonsense for someone to replace the chatbot with IAP.”
“A chatbot is just a communication vehicle. IAP is something much bigger.”
But it was the chatbot that stole the show, both in Carvalho's speech to kick off the previous school year and in a high-profile official launch in March.
The chatbot was visually represented as a smiling sun, often wearing sunglasses.
After learning of the issues at AllHere, “we made the decision within days — and this was done very, very quickly — to turn off the chatbot,” Carvalho said. “We weren’t worried about whether the chatbot would work or not. It works. Our concerns were centered on something that was very important to me — my requirement, which was that there was always a human in charge. And given the staff cuts that we heard had taken place, we wanted to be cautious.”
By “human in the loop,” Carvalho was referring to human oversight of what the automated chatbot would do and say. District officials have not clarified how much oversight AllHere, a small company with other clients and other products, would have provided.
Ongoing maintenance of the system was also a problem, Carvalho said.
“Until there is stabilization in terms of back-of-the-house support, that feature will be disabled,” Carvalho said.
Without the chatbot, Ed’s landing page looks more like a traditional online resource (updated and expanded), with links and drop-down boxes.
Invisible acceleration plan
The Individual Acceleration Plan is not a report that can be printed or viewed online.
Deputy Assistant Director Karla Estrada explained in an interview that the IAP is actually invisible to the user.
The IAP will exist in the background and be the basis for making computer-generated academic recommendations to a student, offering reading suggestions or math topics to work on.
“It’s not like a traditional plan, which is written down and put on a piece of paper,” Estrada said. “It’s supposed to be dynamic with the student and based on their needs as well as ongoing data on performance.”
She added: “The problem is that students don’t want to feel like they’re being forced into a performance plan. They don’t want to feel that way. They want to get that feedback, to know what they need to do to improve, but they don’t want to see: ‘You’re below par in these areas. So you need to improve. ’ They want to understand: ‘How can I continue to improve? ’”
Widespread concerns
There is a lot of confusion about what the education system would improve or replace.
The district, for example, has a parent portal and a standalone site where students log on to complete schoolwork and communicate with teachers. Will Ed replace these sites or add another layer before users get to where they need to go?
What Ed can and can't do remains unclear.
One example Carvalho cited in March was the ability to use Ed to track the school bus and its estimated arrival time. And Ed offered a friendly nudge if a student had recently been late for the bus. But Ed can't do those things yet.
That role is “on the list” of things to do, Estrada said. The district has not yet provided a list of things Ed can or cannot do.
Carvalho and his team face significant challenges.
District officials said Ed was initially rolled out this spring in the district's 100 most “fragile” schools, in an attempt to deliver the new benefit where it was most needed to help with academics, attendance and mental health issues.
But that means the vast majority of nearly 1,000 campuses and more than 400,000 students don't have it.
“We have heard nothing more than the announcement that appeared in the media a few months ago,” said Professor Kim Knapp Soderström. “We have received no information, no explanations, no training.”
“As far as I know, our school is not using this AI portal/platform,” said Jennifer Buscher, a parent of an elementary student at a Westchester school. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”
Evelyn Alemán, who coordinates meetings for Nuestra Voz, which serves low-income Spanish-speaking parents, said her participants “say they don't know anything about technology-driven portals, programs, artificial intelligence, chatbots, etc. Even parents who are leaders of parent centers tell me they don't know anything about this.
“It’s like we’re living in two different universes with LAUSD: one where district leaders are announcing technological advancements with great fanfare, and the other where Latino and Indigenous immigrant parents… are still trying to access and learn new basic technologies and advocate for more pressing issues like literacy, more mental health resources, and school safety, among others.”
Carvalho and his team insist that Ed, with its purported ability to speak 100 languages, will facilitate meaningful interaction.
Parent Elizabeth Bannister, who also has not received information from the district, said she is concerned about the possibility of data breaches.
Father and general contractor Steve Regen said he found private information about his daughter on the dark web.
“I really don’t care that this information came from a ‘cloud storage device that was managed by a former third-party vendor,’” she wrote in an email to district officials. “What I do care about is that LAUSD freely gave this ‘vendor’ full, unrestricted access to our children’s information.”
Regen said the IT team she works with found the full names, birth dates and home addresses, as well as all phone numbers and email addresses associated with her daughter and her friends' LAUSD records.
“Parents deserve to be informed of the seriousness of rape in order to protect their children,” she told The Times.
In a general response, the district told Regen: “We are working to determine what information was involved in this incident and if we determine it involved anyone’s personal information, we will provide notifications to those individuals in accordance with applicable law.”
In a statement, district officials said they have cooperated with investigators and follow the highest standards of data protection.
