An AI platform named Ed was supposed to be an “educational friend” for half a million Los Angeles public school students. In the typed chats, Ed directed students to academic and mental health resources, or told parents whether their children had attended classes that day and provided them with their latest test scores. Ed would even be able to detect and respond to emotions such as hostility, happiness and sadness.
Alberto Carvalho, the district’s superintendent, spoke of Ed in bold terms. In a speech in April promoting the software, he promised that it would “democratize” and “transform education.” In response to AI skeptics, he asked, “Why not let this edutainment approach capture and captivate their attention, become the motivator?”
A seventh-grade girl who tested the chatbot — personified as a smiling, animated sun — said: “I think Ed likes me,” Mr. Carvalho said.
Los Angeles agreed to pay up to $6 million to a startup, AllHere, to develop Ed, a small portion of the district’s $18 billion annual budget. But just two months after Mr. Carvalho’s presentation in April at a glitzy tech conference, AllHere’s founder and chief executive left her post and the company laid off most of its staff. AllHere posted on its website that the furloughs were due to “our current financial situation.”
AI companies market themselves heavily to schools, which spend tens of billions of dollars on technology each year. But AllHere’s sudden collapse illustrates some of the risks of pouring taxpayer dollars into artificial intelligence, a technology with enormous potential but little experience, especially when it comes to children. There are many complex issues at stake, including the privacy of student data and the accuracy of any information offered through chatbots. And AI could also run counter to another growing interest of education officials and parents: reducing children’s screen time.
Natalie Milman, a professor of educational technology at George Washington University, said she often advises schools to take a “wait and see” approach when purchasing new technology. While AI is worth using and testing, she said, she cautioned against schools that “talk nebulously about this glorified tool.” It has limits, and we need to make sure we are critical of what it can do and its potential for harm and misinformation.
AllHere did not respond to interview requests or written questions.
In a statement, Britt Vaughan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district, distinguished between distracted students who are “consumed by their phones during the school day” and students who use laptops or tablets to interact with the Ed platform, which he said is “intended to provide individualized educational pathways to meet student learning.”
Anthony Aguilar, the district’s chief special education officer, said that despite AllHere’s collapse, a truncated version of Ed remains available to families in the district’s 100 “priority” schools whose students struggle with academics and attendance.
But this software is not a sophisticated interactive chatbot. This is a website that brings together information from many other apps the district uses to track homework, grades and support services. Students using the site can also complete certain learning activities on the platform, such as math problems.
The Ed chatbot promoted by Mr. Carvalho has been tested with students ages 14 and up, but it has been taken offline to refine how it answers users’ questions, Mr. Aguilar said. The goal is to have the chatbot available by September, a challenge given that AllHere was supposed to provide ongoing technical support and training to school staff, according to its contract with the district. The district said it hoped AllHere would be acquired and the new owner would continue providing services.
Mr. Aguilar said the idea for the software came from the district, as part of Mr. Carvalho’s plan to help students recover from the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic.
AllHere won a bid to build it, Mr. Aguilar said.
But the project represented a vast and daunting challenge for the startup, best known as a provider of automated text messages from schools to families.
AllHere had attracted $12 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase. Its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, has been featured in Forbes, CBS and other outlets, telling a compelling story. As a former educator whose own students were frequently absent, she said, she founded AllHere in 2016 to help solve the problem.
Automated text messages seemed like a good fit as the COVID-19 pandemic began and chronic absenteeism became a national crisis. In the spring of 2020, AllHere acquired technology developed by Peter Bergman, an economist and education technology expert. It allowed schools to send parents “nudges” via text message about attendance, missed assignments, grades, and other issues.
Ms. Smith-Griffin has often spoken about the creation of AllHere within the Harvard Innovation Labs, a university program designed to support student entrepreneurs. According to Matt Segneri, executive director of the labs, Smith-Griffin first became involved with the program while she was an undergraduate and then graduate student at the Harvard Extension School.
Like many small start-ups, the company has changed its mission over time. Last year, AllHere started talking more about an “intuitive AI-powered chatbot.” AllHere would provide artificial intelligence to schools while keeping a “human in the loop,” the company said, meaning human moderators would supervise the AI to ensure safety – a potentially costly and hand-intensive proposition. -work.
Stephen Aguilar, an education professor at the University of Southern California — who is no relation to Mr. Aguilar of the Los Angeles schools — said it was “a pretty common problem” for schools’ ambitious technology efforts to fail. He previously worked as an educational software developer, including some projects that failed to deliver as promised.
“Districts have many complex needs and many security concerns,” he said. “But they often lack the technical expertise to actually verify what they’re buying.”
The AI foray isn’t the first time Los Angeles has made a big bet on education technology, with questionable results. Starting in 2013, under a previous superintendent, the district spent tens of millions of dollars buying iPads preloaded with educational materials, but that effort was marred by security issues and technical mishaps.
In his April speech at a conference hosted by Arizona State University and GSV Ventures, a venture capital firm, Carvalho said the Ed chatbot would have access to students’ data on test scores, mental health, physical health and family socioeconomic status.
Ms. Smith-Griffin joined him on stage to explain that student data would live in “a walled garden” accessible only within the “Ed ecosystem.”
Ms. Smith-Griffin did not respond to requests for an interview. Mr. Vaughan, of Los Angeles schools, said the district would protect the privacy and security of data on the platform “regardless of what happens to AllHere as a company.”
In April, AllHere said it served “9,100 schools in 36 states.” Some of AllHere’s other school district contracts, in the mid-five figures, were tiny compared to its Los Angeles deal, which had already netted the company more than $2 million, according to a report by The74, an education news site.
Some customers beyond Los Angeles were told the company’s services were essentially gone.
Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland learned from AllHere on June 18 that “effective immediately” the startup would no longer be able to provide its text messaging service, a district spokeswoman said, due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research.
