Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he is moving forward with his artificial intelligence initiative, a platform designed to help students and their families navigate complex situations in the district, despite the bankruptcy of the company that designed the AI chatbot.
In the first extended interview about what was happening, the Los Angeles superintendent described a fully functioning AI-driven platform that the district owns and has in place, which he said currently includes everything except the chatbots.
But parents and teachers are skeptical of this explanation because the platform is not available across the school system and its distinctive features have been sidelined. They say they have no idea how the platform works, how well it works, how to access it, or what it does. The only information they have, they say, comes from glitzy media events.
One parent said she found her daughter's personal information online and questioned the school district's handling of personal data, though the district has denied linking the leaked data to the AI project or AllHere, the Boston company that designed the chatbot.
The Los Angeles Unified School District said the left-behind data was exposed in a data breach by another company after a previous district contractor failed to delete nonpublic district data as required. The district did not respond to questions about the details of the breach, including what information was exposed or how many people were affected. No notices were sent to affected families.
Carvalho touts the chatbot, named “Ed,” as being able to pull information from all of the district's databases to answer school-related questions from faculty, parents, and students, meaning the automated platform collects, processes, and transmits massive amounts of data from the nation's second-largest school system.
The chatbot has been disabled since June 14, after the company learned it had laid off “the majority” of its employees, a company executive said in an email.
The district paid AllHere $3 million for the work completed under a five-year, maximum $6 million contract.
“I want to be very clear about one thing: what was envisioned and what was promised — and I am the owner of the vision for this and I own it — has actually been delivered,” Carvalho said.
“Ed is more than just a chatbot,” he added.
read more: LAUSD shelved an AI chatbot that was touted to help students after the company that developed it went bankrupt.
Carvalho said the district plans to determine an alternative to AllHere, assess potential risks associated with AllHere's collapse, gradually roll out the AI platform to all schools, restore the chatbot and add features to the system, but that this is still a work in progress.
As education news site The 74 reported, investigators working for the school system's inspector general conducted a video interview with AllHere's former senior director of software engineering, Chris Whiteley, on July 2. Whiteley detailed how his former employer allegedly violated both industry standards and the school district's own policies for handling student data.
Carvalho said he would not comment on Whiteley's allegations, but said the school district is not aware of any data breaches related to AllHere.
In his published report, Whiteley did not allege that a data breach occurred, but rather that his former employer's practices created inappropriate risks.
AllHere did not respond to a request for comment.
“School of One”
Carvalho emphasized that the Ed Platform was created as a means to create an Individualized Acceleration Plan (IAP) for every student.
Carvalho said the IAP will be a customized academic strategy and called it a breakthrough. In a TED talk, he explained the initiative: “School of One” For each and every student.
“Ed was conceived as a personalized acceleration platform that would leverage all the data about the student, the curriculum, the supports, the attendance data — all the data from all our partners about that child — and process that data, analyze it and create a plan for that student. AI does that,” Carvalho told the Times.
“Chatbots are just one small feature,” he says, “and by the way, chatbots are the most exciting feature because that's what people recognize as AI. But anyone who uses IAP instead of chatbots is a fool.”
“Chatbots are just a way of communicating. IAP is much bigger than that.”
But in both Carvalho's commencement address last school year and his big public launch in March, the star of the show was the chatbot.
The chatbot was visually represented as a smiling sun (often wearing sunglasses).
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After learning of AllHere's issues, “we made the decision within days, and very quickly, to actually disable the chatbot,” Carvalho said. “I wasn't worried about whether the chatbot would work. It does work. What we were worried about was something that's very important to me, which is my requirement that there be a human being involved at all times. And we saw that there had been cuts, so we wanted to be cautious.”
By “human intervention,” Carvalho meant humans monitoring what the automated chatbot does and says. District officials have not said how much oversight will be provided by AllHere, a smaller company with other clients and other products.
Ongoing maintenance of the system was also an issue, Carvalho said.
“That functionality will be disabled until our back-office support stabilizes,” Carvalho said.
Without the chatbot, Ed’s landing page will look more like a traditional online resource, with links and drop boxes, updated and expanded.
Invisible Acceleration Plan
The Personal Acceleration Plan is not a report that you can print or view online.
Deputy Superintendent Carla Estrada explained in an interview that the IAP is not actually visible to users.
IAP exists in the background and is the basis for creating computer-generated academic recommendations for students, providing reading suggestions and math topics to work on.
“This isn't a traditional plan that's written flat on a piece of paper,” Estrada said. “It's going to be dynamically tailored to the student, based on ongoing data about their needs and performance.”
She added: “The problem is, students don't want to feel like they're being pushed into a performance plan. They don't want to feel that way. They want to receive information and know what they need to do to improve, but they don't want to be told, 'You're low in these areas, so you need to get better'. They want to understand, 'How can I continue to get better?'”
Widespread concerns
There is great confusion about what the Ed system enhances and what it replaces.
For example, your school district may have a parent portal and another site where students log on to for homework and communication with teachers — will Ed replace those sites or add another layer before users get to where they need to be?
It remains unclear what Ed can and can't do.
An example Carvalho gave in March was the ability for Ed to track school buses and their expected arrival times, and to gently nudge students if they were just late to the bus, something Ed can't do yet.
Estrada said the feature is “up in the queue of things to do,” and the district has not yet provided a list of what Ed can and can't do.
Carvalho and his team face a big challenge.
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District officials said Ed was initially rolled out to the district's 100 most “vulnerable” schools this spring, an attempt to bring the new benefits to places where help with academics, attendance and mental health issues is needed most.
But that means the majority of about 1,000 campuses and more than 400,000 students don't have it.
“We haven't heard anything other than what was announced in the media a few months ago,” teacher Kim Knapp Soderstrom said. “There was no information, no explanation, no training.”
“To my knowledge, our school is not using this AI portal/platform,” said Jennifer Buscher, a Westchester Elementary School parent. “I haven't heard anything.”
Evelyn Aleman, who coordinates meetings for Our Voice, an organization that supports low-income Spanish-speaking parents, said participants “say they don't know anything about technology-driven portals, programs, AI, chatbots. Even parents who are leaders in parent centers tell me they don't know anything about this.”
“In LAUSD, it's as if we live in two different worlds: one where district leaders are touting technological advances, and another where Latino, Native American, and immigrant parents are struggling to access and master basic new technologies and advocate for more pressing issues like literacy, increased mental health resources, and school safety.”
Carvalho and his team claim that Ed, which is said to be able to handle 100 languages, will make meaningful engagement easier.
Parent Elizabeth Bannister said she also hasn't received any information from the school district but is concerned about a possible data breach.
Steve Regen, a parent and general contractor, said he found his daughter's personal information on the dark web.
“I am not at all concerned about whether this information came from a 'cloud storage device controlled by a former third-party vendor,'” he wrote in an email to school district officials. “What concerns me is that LAUSD freely gave this 'vendor' complete and unrestricted access to children's information.”
Regen said the IT team he works for found all of the names, birth dates, home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses associated with his daughter and her friends' LAUSD registrations.
“To protect their children, parents should be made aware of the seriousness of the breach,” he told The Times.
In a general response to Regen, the school district told him it was “working to determine what information was involved in this incident, and if we determine that anyone's personal information was involved, we will notify those individuals in accordance with applicable law.”
District officials said in a statement that they were cooperating with investigators and were following the highest standards of data protection.
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This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
