AI ‘Friend’ for Public School Students Falls Flat

An AI platform called Ed would be an “educational friend” to half a million students in Los Angeles public schools. In typed chats, Ed referred students to academic and mental health resources, or told parents if their children had been to class that day and relayed their latest test scores. Ed could even detect and respond to emotions such as hostility, happiness and sadness.

Alberto Carvalho, the district’s superintendent, spoke boldly about Ed. In an April speech promoting the software, he promised it would “democratize” and “transform” education. In response to AI skeptics, he asked, “Why don’t we let this edutainment approach capture their attention and engage them, be their motivator?”

A seventh-grade girl who tested the chatbot — personified by a smiling, animated sun — said, “I think Ed likes me,” Mr. Carvalho said.

Los Angeles agreed to pay a startup company, 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 in April at a glitzy tech conference, AllHere’s founder and CEO left her position and the company furloughed most of its staff. AllHere posted on its website that the layoffs were a result of “our current financial position.”

AI companies are marketing themselves en masse to schools, which spend tens of billions of dollars on technology every year. But the sudden collapse of AllHere illustrates some of the risks of investing taxpayer dollars in artificial intelligence, a technology with enormous potential but little track record, especially when it comes to children. There are many complex issues at play, including the privacy of student data and the accuracy of information provided through chatbots. And AI could also run counter to another growing interest among education 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 adopting new technology. While AI is worth using and testing, she cautioned against schools “talking vaguely about this glorified tool. It has limitations and we need to make sure we’re critical of what it can do and the potential harm and misinformation.”

AllHere did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

In a statement, Britt Vaughan, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles School District, drew a distinction between distracted students who are “consumed on 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 address student learning.”

Anthony Aguilar, the district’s director of special education, said that despite AllHere’s collapse, a shortened version of Ed remained available to families in the district’s 100 “priority schools,” whose students struggle with academic performance and attendance.

But that software isn’t a sophisticated, interactive chatbot. It’s a website that pulls 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.

The Ed chatbot created by Mr. Carvalho was promoted and tested with students aged 14 and over, but was taken offline to refine the way user questions are answered, Mr. Aguilar. The goal is for the chatbot to be available by September, a challenge since AllHere’s contract with the district would require it to provide ongoing technical support and training to school staff. 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 came from the school 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 posed a huge and cumbersome challenge for the startup, best known as a provider of automated text messages from schools to families.

AllHere had raised $12 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase. Its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, was named in Forbes, CBS and other media channels that tell a compelling story. As a former teacher whose own students were often absent, she said, she founded AllHere in 2016 to help solve the problem.

Automated text messages seemed to meet the need when 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 expert in educational technology, it allowed schools to send parents “nudges” via text messages about attendance, missing assignments, grades and other matters.

Ms. Smith-Griffin has often spoken about founding AllHere at Harvard Innovation Labs, a university program that supports student entrepreneurs. According to Matt Segneri, the labs’ executive director, Ms. Smith-Griffin’s affiliation with the program occurred when she was an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Harvard Extension School.

Like many small startups, the company changed its mission over time. Last year, AllHere started talking more about an “AI-powered intuitive chatbot.” AllHere would provide schools with artificial intelligence while keeping a “human informed,” the company said, meaning human moderators would oversee the AI ​​to ensure safety and security — a potentially expensive, labor-intensive proposition.

Stephen Aguilar, a professor of education at the University of Southern California — who is not related to Mr. Aguilar of Los Angeles schools — said it was “a fairly common problem” that ambitious school technology efforts failed. He previously worked as an education software developer, including on a few projects that failed to deliver as promised.

“Districts have a lot of complex needs and a lot of 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 taken a big gamble on education technology, with questionable 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 disfigured due to safety concerns and technical problems.

Speaking in April at a conference hosted by Arizona State University and GSV Ventures, a venture capital firm, Mr. Carvalho said the Ed chatbot would access student data on test scores, mental health, physical health and socioeconomic status. family.

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.” According to reporting from The74an education news site, some of AllHere’s other school district contracts, in the five-figure range, were small compared to the Los Angeles deal, which had already earned the company more than $2 million.

Some customers outside Los Angeles have been told that the company’s services are effectively no more.

Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland was told by AllHere on June 18 that the startup would no longer be able to offer its text messaging service “effective immediately,” a district spokeswoman said, due to ” unforeseen financial circumstances”.

Susan C. Beachy contributed to research.