The AI platform, named Ed, was meant to be an “educational friend” to 500,000 students in Los Angeles public schools. Through typed chat, Ed would direct students to academic and mental health resources, tell parents if their child attended class that day, and provide the latest test scores. Ed could even detect and respond to emotions like hostility, joy, and sadness.
The district's superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, spoke in bold terms about Ed. In a speech promoting the software in April, he promised that Ed would “democratize education” and “transform education.” To AI skeptics, he asked, “Why not engage, captivate and motivate students with this edutainment approach?”
One seventh-grader who tried the chatbot, personified as a smiling, moving sun, reported that “I think Ed likes me,” Carvalho said.
The city agreed to pay up to $6 million to the startup AllHere to develop Ed, a tiny fraction of the district's $18 billion annual budget. But just two months after Mr. Carvalho presented at a glitzy tech conference in April, AllHere's founder and CEO resigned and the company laid off most of its staff. AllHere said on its website that the layoffs were due to “current financial conditions.”
AI companies are heavily marketing themselves to schools, which spend tens of billions of dollars a year on technology. But AllHere's sudden collapse highlights the risks of investing taxpayer money in artificial intelligence, a technology with great potential but little track record, especially when it comes to children. Many complex issues are at stake, including the privacy of student data and the accuracy of information provided through chatbots. AI could also work against another growing concern among education leaders and parents: reducing children's screen time.
Natalie Millman, a professor of educational technology at George Washington University, said she often advises schools to take a “wait and see” approach to purchasing new technology. AI is worth using and testing, but she cautioned schools against “blatantly talking about this over-hyped tool.” “AI has limitations, and we need to be critical of what it can do and the potential for harm and misinformation it can cause.”
AllHere did not respond to interview requests or written questions.
Los Angeles school district spokeswoman Britt Vaughn said in a statement that the move was intended to distinguish between distracted students who are “addicted to their phones during class” and those who use laptops or tablets to interact with Ed platforms, “providing a personalized instructional pathway to address student learning.”
Anthony Aguilar, the district's special education director, said that despite the collapse of All Here, the shortened version of Ed will still be available to families at the district's 100 “priority” schools with students who struggle with academics or attendance.
But the software isn't a sophisticated conversational chatbot. It's a website that collects information from many other apps the district uses to track assignments, grades and support services. Students who use the site can also complete some learning activities on the platform, such as math problems.
Carvalho's Ed Chatbot was tested with students ages 14 and older, but was taken offline to improve how it answers users' questions, Aguilar said. The goal is to have the chatbot available in September, but that's difficult because AllHere's contract with the district requires it to provide ongoing technical support and training to school staff. The district said it expects AllHere to be acquired and that the new owner will continue the service.
Aguilar said the idea for the software came from the school district as part of Carvalho's plan to help students recover from the academic and emotional impacts of the pandemic.
AllHere won the construction of the facility through a competitive bidding process, Aguilar said.
But for the startup best known as a provider of automated text messages from school to home, the project represented an enormous and unwieldy challenge.
AllHere has raised $12 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, has been featured in media outlets like Forbes and CBS and has a compelling story. As a former teacher who found her students were frequently absent from school, she founded AllHere in 2016 to solve that problem.
When the coronavirus pandemic began and chronic absenteeism became a national crisis, automated texting seemed to find its moment: In the spring of 2020, AllHere acquired technology developed by economist and education technology expert Peter Bergman that lets schools send text “nudges” to parents about issues like attendance, missing assignments, and grades.
Smith-Griffin had spoken frequently about starting AllHere at the Harvard Innovation Lab, the university's program that supports student entrepreneurs, when he was an undergraduate and graduate student at the Harvard Extension School, according to Matt Segneri, executive director of the lab.
Like many small startups, the company has changed its mission over time. Last year, AllHere started talking more about an “intuitive AI-powered chatbot.” The company says AllHere provides schools with artificial intelligence while also “putting the human in the loop,” meaning human moderators monitor the AI to ensure safety and security, which can be a potentially costly and labor-intensive proposition.
University of Southern California education professor Steven Aguilar, who is not related to the Los Angeles school's Mr. Aguilar, said that the failure of ambitious school technology initiatives is a “fairly common problem.” He previously worked on educational software projects and some projects failed to deliver as promised.
“School districts have a lot of complex needs and safety concerns,” he said, “but they often lack the technical expertise to really vet what they're buying.”
The foray into AI isn't the first time Los Angeles has spent big on education technology, though the payoff has been questionable: Beginning in 2013, under the previous superintendent, the district spent tens of millions of dollars buying iPads preloaded with curriculum materials, an effort marred by security concerns and technical glitches.
The Ed Chatbot will have access to data on students' test scores, mental health, physical health and families' socioeconomic status, Carvalho said in April at a conference hosted by Arizona State University and venture capital firm GSV Ventures.
Smith-Griffin also took to the stage to explain that student data would be stored in “walled gardens” that would only be accessible within the “education ecosystem”.
Smith-Griffin did not respond to an interview request.Vaughn of the Los Angeles schools district said the district would protect the privacy and security of data on the platform “regardless of what happens to this company, AllHere.”
In April, AllHere said it served “9,100 schools in 36 states.” Education news site The74 reported that AllHere's five-figure contracts with other school districts paled in comparison to the Los Angeles deal, which has already earned the company more than $2 million.
Some customers outside of Los Angeles have been told the company's service is essentially not working.
The Prince George's County Public Schools district in Maryland was informed by AllHere on June 18 that the company would no longer be able to provide its “instant” text messaging service due to “unforeseen financial circumstances,” a district spokesman said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research.