An artificial intelligence platform named Ed was supposed to be an “educational friend” for half a million students in Los Angeles Public Schools. In typed conversations, Ed would direct students to academic and mental health resources, or tell parents if their children had attended class that day and provide the latest test scores. Ed could even detect and respond to emotions such as hostility, happiness and sadness.
Alberto Carvalho, the district superintendent, spoke of Ed in bold words. In an April speech promoting the software, he promised it would “democratize” and “transform education.” Responding to AI skeptics, he asked: “Why not allow this educational approach to capture and capture their attention, be the motivation?”
A seventh-grade girl who tried the chatbot – personified by a smiling, animated sun – had reported: “I think Ed likes me,” Mr Carvalho said.
Los Angeles has agreed to pay a start-up, AllHere, up to $6 million to develop Ed, a small portion of the district’s $18 billion annual budget. But just two months after Mr. Carvalho’s April presentation at a glitzy tech conference, AllHere’s founder and chief executive left her role and the company let go of most of its staff. AllHere posted on its website that the licenses are due to “our current financial position.”
AI companies are marketing heavily to schools, which spend tens of billions of dollars a year on the technology. But AllHere’s sudden collapse shows some of the dangers of investing taxpayer dollars in artificial intelligence, a technology with huge potential but little track record, especially when it comes to children. There are many complex issues, including the privacy of student data and the accuracy of any information provided through chatbots. And AI may also be at odds with another growing concern for educational leaders 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 to buying new technology. While artificial intelligence is worth using and testing, he said, he warned that schools are “guzzling about this glorified tool. It has limitations and we need to make sure we are critical of what it can do and the 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, drew a distinction between distracted students who are “consumed by phones during the school day” and students who use laptops or tablets to interact with the platform Ed, which she said was “aimed at providing personalized educational pathways to address student learning.”
Anthony Aguilar, chief of special education for the district, said that despite AllHere’s collapse, a cut-down version of Ed remained accessible 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. It’s a website that collects information from several other apps the district uses to track assignments, grades and support services. Students using the site can also complete some learning activities on the platform, such as math problems.
The Ed chatbot promoted by Mr. Carvalho was tested with students age 14 and older, but was taken offline to improve how it responds to users’ questions, Mr. Aguilar said. The goal is to have the chatbot available in September, a challenge given that AllHere had to provide ongoing technical support and training to school staff, per its contract with the district. The district said it hoped AllHere would be acquired and that the new owner would continue services.
Mr. Aguilar said the idea for the software originated with the district, as part of Mr. Carvalho’s plan to help students recover from the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic.
AllHere had won a competitive bidding process to build it, Mr. Aguilar said.
But the project represented a huge and unwieldy challenge for the start-up, which was best known as a provider of automated text messages from schools to families.
AllHere had attracted $12 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, has appeared on Forbes, CBS and other media outlets to tell a compelling story. As a former teacher whose students were often absent, she said, she founded AllHere in 2016 to help solve the problem.
Automated text messages seemed to respond 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 “nudges” to parents via text messages about attendance, missing assignments, grades and other issues.
Ms. Smith-Griffin spoke frequently about founding AllHere at Harvard’s Innovation Labs, a university program to support student entrepreneurs. According to Matt Segneri, the labs’ executive director, Ms. Smith-Griffin’s connection to the program occurred when she was an undergraduate and then a graduate student at the Harvard Extension School.
Like many small startups, the company changed its mission over time. Last year, AllHere started talking more about an “intuitive AI-powered chatbot.” AllHere would bring AI to schools while also keeping a “human in the loop,” the company said, meaning human coordinators would oversee the AI to ensure safety and security — a potentially expensive, labor-intensive proposition .
Stephen Aguilar, an education professor at the University of Southern California — who is not related to Mr. Aguilar of the Los Angeles schools — said it was “a fairly common problem” for ambitious school technology efforts to fail. He previously worked as an educational software developer, including some projects that could not be delivered as promised.
“Districts have a lot of complex needs and a lot of security concerns,” he said. “But they often lack the technical know-how to really check what they’re buying.”
The foray into artificial intelligence isn’t the first time Los Angeles has made a big bet on educational technology, with dubious returns. Starting in 2013, under a previous superintendent, the district spent tens of millions of dollars buying iPads preloaded with curriculum materials, but the effort was marred by safety concerns and technical mishaps.
In April Carvalho’s speech at a conference organized by Arizona State University and GSV Ventures, a venture capital firm, he said the Ed chatbot would have access to student 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 the 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.” According to a report by The74, an education news site, some of AllHere’s other school district contracts, in the five-figure range, were tiny compared to its deal with Los Angeles, which had already netted the company more than 2 million dollars.
Some customers beyond Los Angeles have been told that the company’s services are essentially down.
Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland learned from AllHere on June 18 that “effective immediately” the startup will no longer be able to provide its texting service, a district spokesperson said, due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research.
