The Los Angeles School District thought it had found the ideal leader.
During his 14-year tenure as Miami City Superintendent, Alberto M. Carvalho improved student test scores and built a reputation for innovation and uplifting poor students. He wore a perfect suit and spoke fluent Spanish. His sophisticated public appearance seemed tailor-made for the attention of Los Angeles.
But some red flags, such as technology meltdowns and romance scandals, were put aside when Carvalho was hired as Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent in 2021 as the district emerged from the pandemic.
A week after the FBI raided his Los Angeles home and offices at district headquarters, Mr. Carvalho's past problems have come under intense scrutiny. The federal government has not said exactly who or what it is investigating. Carvalho, who has been placed on paid leave, has not yet commented.
The investigation appears to have stemmed from a preliminary investigation into an education technology startup that won a contract from Carvalho's Los Angeles Unified. A company called AllHere tried to build an AI chatbot for students, but it quickly went out of business. Its founder was charged with fraud. The district's deal with Allhere was brokered by Carvalho, a longtime colleague and friend from his time in Miami.
The investigation has upended Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school district, and raised new questions about the technology industry's pursuit of public education funding and the extent to which districts vet their leaders. In Los Angeles, some wonder if this, too, is about politics.
Carvalho's supporters point to the Trump administration's controversial relationship with deep-blue California as one reason he may have been targeted. For example, Carvalho, an outspoken advocate for immigrant children, declared in 2017 that the Trump administration could remove children from classrooms “out of concern for my dead body.”
But with investigations into the troubled education technology company beginning under the Biden administration, residents in the city, including some of Mr. Carvalho's fans, are less certain that Mr. Carvalho is a political target.
Ana Teresa Dahan, a nonprofit leader who has worked with the superintendent, said Carvalho's leadership has been good for the district overall. But she and others also think that Mr. Carvalho's confidence, charisma and left-leaning politics may have obscured the city's problems.
“The first thing everyone felt was, wow, this is Trump's revenge,” Dahan said. “For 24 hours, we were all waiting for Mr. Trump to tweet something. And he didn't. And now it's so scary that the best-case scenario might be for Mr. Trump to go after him.”
immigrant story
Mr. Carvalho, 61, often told the classic bootstrap story. He grew up in poverty in Portugal, with parents who only received a third-grade education. Two of his brothers died young because they did not receive proper medical care.
After graduating from high school, he overstayed on a visitor visa and moved to New York City, where he worked as a dishwasher. He moved to Miami and became homeless for a short period of time, sleeping in a U-Haul truck. However, with the help of Republican Congressman E. Clay Shaw Jr., he eventually obtained a student visa. He then became a citizen, he said.
He graduated from Barry University and became a high school physics teacher, rising to the rank of assistant principal and then holding various positions at district headquarters.
He was known for his elegant dress and quick learning, earning him the nickname “Armani.” He was also adept at getting close to South Florida's political establishment and business leaders.
In 2008, the Miami-Dade County Board of Education appointed Mr. Carvalho as superintendent. He embraced a reform agenda that closely aligned with Obama-era bipartisan priorities.
He took over an underperforming school, forcibly expelled the principal, and tightly controlled the curriculum. He also championed school choice and launched iPrep Academy, a new magnet school that combined online and traditional courses with the goal of “personalizing learning,” a popular buzzword at the time. Unusually, he appointed himself school principal while serving as superintendent. He has won many “Director of the Year” awards.
“Those were the golden years,” said Marta Perez, who served as Miami-Dade's school board member from 1998 to 2022.
A turbulent history
Still, there were moments of scandal.
Leaked emails in 2008 showed a romantic relationship between Mr. Carvalho and a young education reporter for the Miami Herald. Carvalho, who is married, said the two had not had an affair, but acknowledged that their communication was inappropriate. Although the woman's journalistic career was over, Carvalho continued to rise despite rumors of other sexual impropriety.
The former reporter declined an interview request.
In 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio offered Carvalho the job of leading the nation's largest school district, considered by many to be the most prestigious school in public education. he accepted it.
At a packed Miami-Dade School Board meeting, speakers lined up one after another at microphones to plead for Carvalho to remain in office. After calling Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Carvalho returned and announced on live television that he would back out and remain in Miami. The crowd cheered. New Yorkers were stunned.
People in Miami forgave him for his shortcomings, Perez said, because “he was doing very well for his students.”
There were other problems as well. In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, edtech company K12 (now called Stride) agreed to provide Miami-Dade with an online learning platform, the cost of which would be covered with federal relief money.
Teachers found they could not upload class rosters or lesson plans without the software crashing. Although the district withdrew from the agreement, Carvalho sought an unusual $1.57 million donation from K12 to a district-related foundation. The funds were to be distributed to teachers in the form of $100 gift cards to compensate for software issues.
The district's inspector general's 2021 report said the episode did not violate any laws, but concluded that Carvalho had created a “pretense of fraud” by soliciting donations from vendors with pending contracts.
The targets of the current FBI investigation are unclear, but two school board members said subpoenas have been sent to Miami-Dade County Public Schools, its Office of the Inspector General and foundations affiliated with the district.
move west
By 2021, Carvalho was dealing with pandemic politics and a new Republican onslaught on public education in Florida. In Los Angeles, students needed an academic restart as they experienced the longest pandemic shutdown in the country.
When Carvalho agreed to a four-year contract, Scott Schmerelson, current board chairman, was “overjoyed” to vote yes.
Six months later, Carvalho was posting photos of himself skydiving over Southern California and riding a white horse at sunset in Topanga Canyon while wearing a tight T-shirt. He developed a corporate-style strategic plan to help the district recover from the pandemic, even as it faced a flurry of new crises, including a spike in teen fentanyl overdoses and a cyberattack that compromised thousands of student records.
California was an adjustment. The leaders of laid-back Los Angeles looked on at his swagger in South Florida. When he lambasted organized labor, calling early contract negotiations a “circus,” two powerful public employee unions that had long been at loggerheads banded together to call him a buffoon. Then they went on strike.
As he tried to gain a foothold, he also relied on some colleagues he brought in from Miami.
In 2024, Carvalho introduced the AllHere chatbot, called Ed, at a high-profile technology conference, promising to “democratize” education and become a “friend” to struggling students. However, the technology had flaws and was far from the cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence being developed by major companies.
The ill-fated deal with Allhere involved at least three former colleagues from Miami. Debra Kerr, an education technology sales representative whom Carvalho has known for more than a decade in Miami, was a consultant for the company. According to bankruptcy records, she claimed more than $1 million in unpaid fees from AllHere.
Her son, Richard Kerr, also worked at the start-up. And Daisy Gonzalez Diego, who headed Carvalho's communications in Miami, later consulted for the company.
Seven months after Ed's rollout, AllHere founder Joanna Smith-Griffin was indicted on fraud charges for allegedly misleading investors by exaggerating the company's revenue and customer base. According to court documents, her lawyers and the government have postponed the trial for “potential disposition,” which could mean she was expecting a plea deal.
An outside law firm hired by the Los Angeles Board of Education to review the agreement found no criminal activity, according to a district official who spoke on condition of anonymity. But technology and education experts are questioning the idea that any school system needs to invest millions of dollars to build custom AI products with small startups. There is little research to suggest that interacting with AI helps students learn.
“This was a fly-by-night company,” said Benjamin Reilly, a policy expert who has been critical of how AI is being implemented in schools.
Carr, whose Florida home was also searched, promoted other companies serving Los Angeles Unified under Carvalho. These include RethinkEd, which provides online lesson plans and teacher training focused on social-emotional skills, and Hazel Health, which provides telehealth to schools.
Kerr, RethinkEd and Hazel Health did not respond to requests for comment.
Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California's School of Education, praised Carvalho as an excellent communicator and overall consistent leader. But he acknowledged that the AllHere deal raised legitimate questions.
“These companies are putting a lot of resources into marketing to schools,” he said. “Local authorities are at a huge disadvantage because they are not always the most informed consumers.”
The board renewed Carvalho's contract last September with a salary of $440,000. He and his wife own six homes in Florida and one in California, valued at about $6 million, according to public records. He also has significant personal stock holdings, including more than $1 million each in pharmaceutical company iBio and aluminum giant Alcoa, according to his 2022 financial disclosure filing with Los Angeles Unified.
Many Los Angeles residents praise Carvalho's resistance to the Trump administration's deportation campaign. Gov. Gavin Newsom praised Carvalho's recovery in math and reading in January. The day before his home was raided at dawn by FBI agents wearing bulletproof vests, the school district announced that enrollment in Advanced Placement was increasing.
Carvalho's career future is currently uncertain, and many in Los Angeles are wondering why he is under investigation.
“His kind of confidence may not be to everyone's taste,” said Dahan, a nonprofit leader. “But if more children can read and write, I'd like to drink that tea.”
Patricia Mazzei, Stephanie Saul and Terry Spencer contributed reporting. Georgia Gee, Susan C. Beachy, Sealag McNeil and kitty bennett contributed to research.
