Federal prosecutors have indicted the founder and former CEO of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy.

Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tuesday on allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

The 33-year-old former educator’s arrest is the latest chapter in the downfall of “Ed,” a buzzy, $6 million AI chatbot that Smith-Griffin’s company was tapped to build for the Los Angeles Unified School District before the project was halted and the company shuttered. L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and Smith-Griffin appeared together at several events earlier this year to promote the chatbot, an ed tech innovation Carvalho said was “unprecedented in American public education.”

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed in Manhattan federal court accuses Smith-Griffin of defrauding investors and using company funds for a down payment on her North Carolina house and to pay for her 2021 wedding. 

Smith-Griffin “orchestrated a deliberate and calculated scheme to deceive investors” in the company she founded through a Harvard University startup incubator in 2016 to provide a tech-driven solution to student absences. She inflated “the company’s financials to secure millions of dollars under false pretenses,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a media release. “The law does not turn a blind eye to those who allegedly distort financial realities for personal gain.” 

Smith-Griffin is being represented by Eric Brignac, an assistant public defender with the Federal Public Defender’s Office. Brignac, who is based out of Raleigh, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to The 74, an L.A. schools spokesperson portrayed the district, by far AllHere’s biggest customer, as one of many taken in by Smith-Griffin. Previously, the school district and its inspector general’s office opened separate inquiries into the school system’s work with AllHere.

“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”

Between 2017 and June 2024, prosecutors allege, Smith-Griffin used her control over AllHere’s bank accounts to transfer at least $600,000 in company funds to her personal account, generally using PayPal and Zelle to make repeat wire transfers under $10,000. 

Federal prosecutors said the fraud scheme began as early as November 2020, when Smith-Griffin allegedly began to misrepresent to her investors the company’s revenue, customer base and cash on hand. In the spring of 2021, she told investors AllHere had generated some $3.7 million in revenue in the previous year, including through contracts with the New York City and Atlanta school districts. In reality, federal prosecutors allege, the company had only generated $11,000 — and contracts with the two major urban school systems didn’t exist. 

Key AllHere funders include the venture firms Rethink Education, Spero Ventures and Potencia Ventures. Their representatives  didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

When investors and an outside accountant accidentally discovered the discrepancies between the company’s actual financials and its claim to backers, Smith-Griffin masqueraded as a financial consultant to perpetuate the scheme, prosecutors allege. She was accused of creating a fake email address for the phony outside consultant, which she used to send fraudulent documents to her largest investor. 

Though one of the firm’s biggest investors “recruited high profile” education leaders to the company’s board of directors, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson, the indictment notes that Smith-Griffin “exercised exclusive control” over AllHere’s communications with investors, board members, customers and outside vendors.

The indictment adds further uncertainty around the AI chatbot the company created for and launched with such fanfare earlier this year with Los Angeles schools, the country’s second-largest district.

As K-12 school systems nationwide rush to inject artificial intelligence into their teaching practices, the L.A. chatbot has emerged as a cautionary tale of what could go wrong. On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department released guidance on ways schools can harness AI while ensuring they don’t have a discriminatory impact on vulnerable and underserved students. 

In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the chatbot together at the influential ASU+GSV ed tech conference in San Diego. Carvalho said Ed was the nation’s first AI-enabled “personal assistant” and would drive academic improvement while providing Los Angeles’s roughly 540,00 students and their families with a trove of helpful information upon request.

Signs of turmoil emerged in June, when The 74 first reported that Smith-Griffin was out of a job as AllHere furloughed a majority of its staff due to its “current financial position.” A statement from the L.A. district said the company had been put up for sale. 

The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August. At a bankruptcy hearing in September, Toby Jackson, one of AllHere’s only remaining employees and its former chief technology officer, struggled to explain why the company had paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses in the past year alone. 

“That is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” said Jackson, who said that Smith-Griffin “did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.”  

Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

The 74 first reported the possible criminal charges in early October, when Delaware court documents related to AllHere’s bankruptcy case revealed a grand jury subpoena by federal prosecutors. Even before the company laid off employees and announced its financial woes, a former employee-turned-whistleblower told The 74 that AllHere had struggled to produce a “proper product” for the L.A. district and took shortcuts that ran afoul of school district policies and bedrock student data privacy principles. 

By the time AllHere went bankrupt earlier this year, it never had more than 31 customers total — less than a third the number Smith-Griffin told investors she had by early 2021. By the time the company collapsed this year, only three of AllHere’s customers generated more than $100,000 in revenue. 

In total, the felony charges carry a 42-year prison sentence for Smith-Griffin, who began her  career working in a Boston charter school as a teacher and family engagement director.

“Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said in the release. “The FBI will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of education opportunities for our city’s children will be taught a lesson.” 

Los Angeles Unified is seeking voters’ approval for a $9 billion bond measure to repair and upgrade its aging school buildings.  

The bond, which Californians will vote on Tuesday as Measure US, would be LAUSD’s largest ever and paid for with property tax increases. It requires a 55% majority in order to pass. 

LAUSD Board members in August issued a resolution calling for the measure, citing reports from the district that described structural shortcomings and deferred maintenance in the district’s school buildings, which number more than 13,500. 

Unlike many other states, California does not set aside funding for school capital projects in its annual state budget. Such projects instead are paid for by bonds issued at the state or local level, which are typically funded by property taxes. 

Los Angeles voters often exhibit support for school construction legislation such as Measure US. Headwinds facing the bond include plummeting enrollment in LAUSD, an ongoing budget crunch and a statewide school construction bond on the ballot this year.

Measure US is supported by members of the LAUSD board, district superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the teachers union and local construction groups. It’s opposed by some taxpayer advocacy groups and has been criticized by members of the local charter school community.  

Carvalho argued that the bond is necessary at a board meeting to introduce Measure US in August. “I’ve seen firsthand our aging and outdated facilities, in many instances, our subpar learning environments, our lack of green space, our lack of outdoor space,” said Carvalho. 

Here are five things to know about the the $9 billion bond: 

1. LA’s school buildings need help. 

LA Unified, the nation’s second largest district, boasts more than 1,500 schools spread out across 710 square miles. As is often the case in large, urban districts, many of the school buildings in Los Angeles are older, and some are in rough shape.  

According to figures kept by LAUSD, at least 60% of the schools in the district were built before 1975. Many of those older buildings need upgrades and renovations such as new roofs, ventilation systems, seismic updates or tech upgrades. According to LAUSD’s own estimates the district needs to replace roughly 50,000 HVAC units, two million square feet of plumbing and 18 million square feet of roofing. 

LA Unified school buildings also suffer from a lack of green space and accessible facilities for students with disabilities. Beyond that, the district has also highlighted a need for investment in technology for its schools, such as video camera systems and alarm and monitoring systems to improve campus safety. 

2. Not even $9 billion can fix the district’s building problems. 

According to the district’s own estimates, $9 billion won’t entirely cover the cost of needed upgrades and repairs to school buildings. Carvalho says the district actually needs at least $80 billion to fully repair and modernize its schools.

Another problem with LA Unified school buildings is that there are too many of them, and they are too big. District officials have said the school system is built for about 650,000 students, but there are now fewer than 410,000 students enrolled in LAUSD schools at district-run TK-12 programs. 

With no end to dropping enrollment in sight, a tricky problem facing LAUSD is what to do with all those classrooms when they’re not being used by students. Carvalho has said closing schools is on the table, but so far the district has avoided doing that. 

3. The state puts its own, $10 billion school construction bond to voters this year. 

State lawmakers have put a statewide bill forward to voters this year for a separate set of  school buildings bonds. Proposition 2 would fund repairs and upgrades at public schools and community colleges around the state. 

Los Angeles Unified stands to gain just a small fraction of that $10 billion included in the statewide bond from the legislation, an amount that district officials say is far too small to address the facilities needs there.

And that’s not all when it comes to school repairs for California this election cycle – besides the statewide measure and the measure on the ballot in LA, 252 districts around the state also have school building bonds up before voters next week. 

4. Charter schools could be shortchanged by LA’s measure.

Measure US sets aside $300 million for charter schools out of the $9 billion total that it seeks to borrow from voters and pay for with a bond. 

California Charter Schools Association Vice President Keith Dell’Aquila said those allotments shortchange charter schools, which account for roughly 22% of LAUSD’s enrollment, including district-affiliated schools.

“Twenty-two percent of the students should see and benefit from more than three percent of the revenues,” said Dell’Aquila at an August board meeting to discuss the bond. 

“We need to be working in collaboration and partnership,” he added. “We see the same challenges: the leaky roofs, the insufficient special education space, too much concrete and not enough grass, the need to reinvest and modernize our schools.” 

Charter-backed upstart Dan Chang failed in the Nov. 5 elections to unseat Scott Schmerelson, the longtime LAUSD educator and policymaker who won the election and will begin his third and final term on the LA Unified board in January. 

Chang conceded in a message to supporters that he wasn’t going to be able to overcome Schmerelson’s 4 percentage point lead. 

Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, who previously helped found charter schools in LA, trailed behind Schmerelson with 48% of the vote, while Schmerelson garnered  52%.

The contest between the two men had the potential to tip the district’s school board away from a 4-3 majority of union-backed members, and impact the board’s handling of several controversial issues facing LAUSD, including restrictions on charter schools’ use of buildings, which Chang said he’d move to reverse if elected. 

Schmerelson’s victory is part of a successful election season for many teachers union-backed candidates. 

The outspoken former teacher and principal has sided closely with local unions on issues of space and resources for charter schools. His win could mean more headwinds for the nation’s largest charter school sector here moving forward. 

Schmerelson’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Two other LA Unified school board races being decided by voters this year were not as close.

For District 1 in South LA, board admin Sherlett Hendy Newbill defeated Kahllid Al-Alim with 71% of the vote, versus 29% for Al-Alim, whom the teachers union dropped in the primary over anti-semitic social media. 

For LAUSD Board District 5, which covers parts of Northeast and Southeast LA, union-backed Karla Greigo led Graciela Ortiz with 61% of the vote, versus 39% held by Ortiz.

Meanwhile, a majority of LA voters voiced their approval of a $9 billion bond measure to repair and upgrade aging school buildings. 

As of Friday, voters cast 68% of ballots in favor of Measure US, which was backed by members of the LAUSD board, district superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the teachers union and local construction groups.  

Measure US would be LAUSD’s largest ever school facilities bond, and would be paid for with property tax increases. It requires a 55% majority in order to pass. 

The Los Angeles County Clerk is still counting votes and is providing updated vote counts daily. 

As of Friday the clerk had recorded more than 3.7 million votes in all the elections held November 5, with roughly 35% of eligible voters still uncounted.

The district’s $120 million Black Student Achievement Plan had a clear goal: lifting the academic performance of Black students, who trail behind other groups in assessments of reading and math, providing students extra tutors, and added training for their teachers.  

The program is now in doubt after Arlington-based Parents Defending Education filed a civil rights complaint arguing it violates federal law by using race “solely” as a criteria for admission, prompting the district to change its policy.

“At bottom, the Black Student Achievement Plan and its benefits are open to some students but not others — and that exclusion is solely based on an individual’s race,” the group’s complaint said. 

In response, LAUSD said it’s no longer using race as a factor in choosing which schools participate. But the program’s future remains murky even with the changes because it could still be open to future legal challenges. 

Still, it’s a dramatic turn of events for LAUSD’s signature Black initiative, and shows the powerful influence out-of-town interests can have on local policy.  

LASUD officials said the district will still give BSAP the same resources as previous years and its programs are staying the same; and all students — not just Black students — are eligible for the help. 

The five-year-old BSAP had seemed to be headed for success by targeting Black kids. 

With broad support from LA Unified’s board, teachers and families, the program deployed counselors and social workers at roughly 50 schools, which together enrolled more about a third of the district’s Black students. 

And this year, the district’s Black students made gains on math and reading tests that outpaced those of other student groups. The district’s Black students also this year outscored Black students around the state on the annual exams.  

Since PDE filed its complaint, superintendent Alberto Carvalho said LA Unified was “able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”

“Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. 

Representatives for PDE, which has lodged more civil rights complaints against at least ten other school districts around the nation, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A website for the non-profit says it is a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas,” including critical race theory and restorative justice. 

PDE’s board includes Edward Blum, the conservative litigant who previously founded an organization that won a 2023 Supreme Court decision against Harvard University to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. 

In its complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights, PDE argued the BSAP violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by using race to decide which students get extra educational services.

After LA Unified dropped race as an official factor in those decisions, OCR dismissed the group’s complaint, heading off a potential legal battle. But PDE could revive its complaint. 

The district’s strategy has drawn fire from its teachers union, activists and students who protested an Oct. 22 board meeting. An online letter-writing campaign urges LA Unified to “reinstate Black student population as a criterion for BSAP school allocation.”

Without race to guide which schools participate in the BSAP, University of Southern California education professor Julie Slayton said LAUSD will have to use other factors in deciding how to distribute extra resources to students. 

“They’ll take away the language of ‘Black,’ ” Slayton said. “But it doesn’t have to change, profoundly, the way that they’re thinking about the distribution of these resources and the schools that will receive them.” 

As of the 2023-2024 school year, LAUSD enrolled 17,245 homeless students, up 26% from the previous school year, according to data the district made public last month.  

The dramatic jump comes as the district struggles with years of increases in the enrollment of homeless students, and the loss of pandemic-era federal funding that since 2020 propped up programs to aid kids experiencing homelessness.

“It is heartbreaking that mothers and children would be facing (homelessness) in our community, one of the richest cities in the world,” said LA superintendent Alberto Carvalho at a Sept. 21 press conference, calling the situation “a very unusual” scenario. 

But the increase of homeless students is also an intensification of a longstanding trend. During the 2021-2022 school year, there were 11,314 homeless students in the district, with the figure jumping nearly 21% that year to 13,656 in the 2022-23 school year.

Researchers have identified high housing costs and financial instability as reasons for rising homelessness in California. Los Angeles, in particular, has some of the most expensive housing costs in the country. 

Carvalho, who has spoken publicly about a period in his life when he was homeless while growing up in Miami, said homeless kids face special challenges at school — and in life generally.

“They have many elements in common,” said Carvalho of homeless kids. “They are facing poverty, often English language limitations, immigration.” 

LAUSD has also seen obstacles to boosting homeless students’ academic success. In 2022, almost 70% of homeless students in the district were considered chronically absent. Homeless students are also less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. 

Jennifer Kottke, Homeless Education Project director for Los Angeles County, said part of the increase may actually be attributed to better reporting, after state lawmakers in 2022 passed legislation to mandate housing reporting for all families. 

But Kottke also said increases in the cost of housing and food have made it more difficult for families to live comfortably in Los Angeles. 

And the district will soon lose an important source of funding for homeless services, she said. 

Federal American Rescue Plan funding provided to LAUSD and other U.S. districts during COVID-19 pandemic officially expired on September 30th, although programs paid for by the relief money may continue to operate. 

Part of the money in LAUSD went to services for homeless students, where the funding paid for tutoring services, after-school programs, housing vouchers, and money for toiletries.

Now, many of those programs will be closing, Kottke said. The lack of funding will also affect temporary housing vouchers Los Angeles Unified was able to give families to help them get back up on their feet, and will also force staff cuts, she added.  

“It’s all American Rescue Plan funding,” said Kottke. “Once those materials are gone, it will be hard to refill them.”

LAUSD must find creative ways to combat rising homelessness, and do so quickly.  

And even though the district faces budgetary pressure on several fronts, Carvalho and the school board continue to push for new programs aimed at boosting outcomes for homeless kids.

Over the summer, the district opened a 26-unit housing complex to help combat rising homelessness. And last month the district announced the opening of on-campus clothing boutiques meant to supply school outfits for students who need them.  

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Once a fast-growing experiment in education reform, LA Unified’s decades-old charter school sector has never seen challenges like those it faces today, with falling enrollment, tough new policies, and a hostile school board that has throttled charters’ access to public school space.

But the school board part of that equation could shift, if LAUSD teacher and charter-supporting rabble rouser Dan Chang can take LA Unified’s seat for school board District 3 in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, from teachers’ union-backed incumbent Scott Schmerelson.

Chang and Schmerelson share many of the same priorities for board policies, but Chang said he sought to address fraud and waste in LA Unified, while Schmerelson said he’d seek to ensure traditional district-run public schools aren’t constrained by the presence of charters in public school buildings. 

With the teachers’ union struggling to defend its 4-3 majority on the board, Chang and Schmerelson’s race will decide whether the board tips in favor of charters and school reforms, versus more orthodox approaches to improving schools favored by the union.   

Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, whose first education job was at a charter school management organization, said in an interview that if he is elected he’d juice the city’s charter sector by moving to repeal the controversial policy established this year that limits where charters may operate.  

“LA Unified needs a new voice,” said Chang, who also previously led the boards of two charter schools in the San Fernando Valley. “It’s critical to have someone with my experience on the board.”

The contest in District 3 is the most expensive school board race this year in LA, a city known for the costliest school board elections in the nation, with more than $4 million raised or spent on behalf of the campaigns of Chang and Schmerelson.

Schmerelson, a former teacher and principal who’s held the seat at District 3 since 2014, is viewed as a steady hand on the board amid tumultuous times, beat Chang in the March primaries, winning nearly 45% of the vote, compared to 29% for Chang.   

It wasn’t enough to prevent the race from going to a runoff at the general election next month, but Schmerelson, who is viewed as the favorite in the race, is sanguine. He has some reason to be confident, having broad support in his district and a track record of winning.

“I accept that I was elected by my constituents in board District 3, and I make sure that my schools get the attention that they need, everything that they need,” said Schmerelson. 

In 2020 Schmerelson defeated challenger Marilyn Koziatek in the general election, despite more than $6 million spent on Koziatek’s behalf by groups including those backing charter schools.

“The race is Scott’s to lose,” said David Tokofsky, former LAUSD board member and district gadfly.  

Tokofsky, who has worked on LAUSD board races for decades, estimated Chang’s campaign would have to outspend Schmerelson by four to one in order to capture the seat.

The latest filings show Chang’s campaign hasn’t quite reached the magic 4:1 ratio, yet. Chang’s campaign and its backers have raised or spent more than $3.6 million so far in the race, compared to nearly $1.4 million for Schmerelson’s campaign.

But with nearly a month left in the race, that could still change, Tokofsky said.

Los Angeles Unified is the largest district in the country controlled by a school board. LAUSD board members are relatively well-compensated compared to those of many other districts, with yearly salaries of $125,000. 

LAUSD school board members are also given a staff. Board members choose the district’s superintendent, help set district policy and control LA Unified’s $18.8 billion budget. 

LAUSD board elections in 2017 set a record for the most expensive school board races in U.S. history, with around $15 million spent that year on races that moved the board in the direction of pro-charter education reformers.

The outsize campaign spending in Los Angeles is unique, because the city has an organized opposition in the charter community to the teachers’ union, setting up arms races in campaign spending to control the board.

That’s compared to other cities, where unions often dominate board elections and their candidates often coast to victory. In places like New York and Chicago, the mayor appoints the school board, so unions concentrate their money on mayoral races.

With nearly 20% of the district’s enrollment, including LAUSD-affiliated charters, the charter sector in Los Angeles is the nation’s largest, with well-organized operations in advocacy and campaign finance.

The statewide California Charter School Association Advocates has endorsed Chang and helped fund efforts to get him elected, including television and radio advertisements targeted at LAUSD families who will vote in next month’s election.

CCASA Advocates Executive Director Gregory McGinity said his group is confident that Chang will fight to improve educational options and boost academic outcomes for all LAUSD students and not just those in charter schools.

“His commitment to expanding access to high-quality public schools—both traditional and charter public schools—aligns with our mission to empower families,” McGinity said. “We are confident in his ability to represent all voices and champion educational equity for all students.”

United Teachers Los Angeles, which endorsed Schmerelson and helped fund efforts to keep his seat in this year’s race, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the race this year.

But in a statement on the union web site, UTLA lists the qualifications of Schmerelson, a former Spanish teacher, saying that he has ensured funding for schools in his district and pushed for changes in LA Unified to make schools cleaner and safer, reduce class sizes and boost students’ test scores.

“Schmerelson will make sure students feel safe and can meet their full potential,” states the UTLA’s endorsement.

UTLA has a track record of backing successful candidates in LAUSD board races, and retook majority control of the LAUSD board in 2022 after charter advocates gained control of the board in 2017’s highly contested races.

Both Chang and Schmerelson said ensuring a post-pandemic academic recovery for all LAUSD students, increasing campus safety and addressing enrollment declines are among their top priorities for new policies in the coming years.

Where they differ is how to achieve those aims, with Schmerelson favoring magnet programs, high-impact tutoring and investments in traditional public schools as a means for academic improvement, compared to Chang’s emphasis on high-performing charters.

Both men favor the presence of police on LAUSD campuses as a means of improving school safety. The winner of the pivotal race will help shape the direction of the district as it contends with challenges including a shrinking budget and increasing school violence.

 “The weird thing is, if you listen to the candidates, it’s very hard to tell them apart. They all say more-or-less the same things on the issues,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

“So you can’t really distinguish the candidates based on what they’re saying or what they’re putting out in campaign materials,” he added. “You really do have to follow the money.”

I have always enjoyed working with students and felt it is a way to give back to the community. 

When I enrolled at the University of Southern California two years ago, I kept up the tutoring, bringing my skills to elementary schools in the low income neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. 

What I quickly noticed was, despite the San Gabriel Valley being only 20 miles away from South Central LA, there was a huge disparity in literacy levels. 

The kids in the Valley could read at far more advanced levels than the kids in South Central. And the test scores confirmed what I saw in the classroom.

According to U.S. News & World Report, 77% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading in the Arcadia Unified School District, in the Valley where I tutored; and 76% tested at or above that level for math. 

Compare that with the literacy levels for Los Angeles Unified District, where 43% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 36% tested at or above that level for math. 

During my first semester tutoring in South Central, I had a 4th grade student who struggled to read. 

As I continued my time tutoring in South Central, I realized many of my students struggled with reading and pronouncing words. I spoke to teachers who told me that the pandemic took a toll on learning. 

Some students struggled to focus on their work during online classes. And many struggled with disruption and trauma caused by the pandemic, teachers said.  

But I found there were ways that I could help these kids learn to read. 

I focused my lesson plans on phonics, the building blocks of words. We focused on pronouncing different letter combinations with a phonics book as my chosen curriculum. It turned out that my decision to focus on phonics made a huge difference.  

I used phonics to teach reading because it helped me guide my students. While I know all the pronunciations and word combinations, I didn’t have a list of sounds or letter combinations to teach, so a phonics textbook helped with giving my lessons structure.

As it turns out, districts around the country are embracing phonics as part of a movement in teaching called “the science of reading,” which relies on letter recognition and sounding out words to teach literacy. New York City has rolled out a phonics-based curriculum and Los Angeles Unified is in the process of doing so.

A number of states have laws to mandate the science of reading, but an effort to pass such a law in California failed last year. Still, educators and districts are free to use the tools of phonics in their lessons. 

Through my phonics-based lessons, my students started to increase their literacy level, and reading became easier for them. However, one tutor can only do so much. 

There are many variables that can contribute to the educational chasm. The average household income for the San Gabriel Valley is $115,525, and the average household income for South Central is $64,927, according to Point2Homes. Wealth puts some students ahead academically. 

From my experience, I know that many families in the San Gabriel Valley hire tutors to ensure their children stay on track and perhaps even surpass the educational requirements of their schools. 

But although students in the San Gabriel Valley have more financial resources, that doesn’t mean LAUSD elementary students can’t meet or exceed San Gabriel Valley’s test scores. 

To increase literacy rates in South Central schools, I believe that teachers and parents should create a culture where students are encouraged to read more. Students should view reading as something fun rather than work. 

While tutors can facilitate the reading process, students need to be self-motivated. Tutors can help students pronounce words and teach them the basic building blocks of reading. However, if students don’t read on their own time, they can’t take their skills to the next level. 

That’s why it’s so important for teachers and families to impart kids with a love of reading. The combination of phonics and a genuine interest in reading creates lifelong learners.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York served the grand jury subpoena in early September to the court-appointed trustee managing the liquidation of AllHere’s assets to pay off its creditors, according to records filed with a federal court in Delaware. A federal grand jury subpoena indicates that AllHere or someone associated with the company is the target of a federal criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.  

Attorney Stephanie Wickouski, a partner at the New York-based firm Locke Lord, told The 74 the subpoena means that federal prosecutors “have a reason to commence a criminal investigation and that’s certainly an exceptional circumstance.” 

“There are a fair amount of investigations that involve bankruptcy cases and a lot of them are for conduct that occurred prior to the bankruptcy,” said Wickouski, the author of a textbook on bankruptcy fraud and white-collar crime. 

In an order approved on Monday, the bankruptcy trustee agreed to provide documents to federal prosecutors on the condition that certain sensitive information remain confidential “in the best interests of” the company’s value. Federal prosecutors can use the records “as needed or as required by law in connection with its investigation and/or any resulting criminal proceeding,” the order notes.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment and the target of the federal inquiry remains unclear — as do any allegations of criminal wrongdoing. But Wickouski said the court-appointed trustee is in the best position to provide information about AllHere’s assets, business dealings and financial transactions. The “most likely scenario,” she said, is that “the company and its principals” are the target of the investigation.

On the same day as a Sept. 11 bankruptcy hearing, trustee George Miller said he had “discovered assets” at AllHere and changed its Chapter 7 bankruptcy case from one without any monetary value to one where creditors could recoup some of the money they’re owed. The court gave AllHere creditors 90 days to submit proof of claims to “assets from which a dividend might possibly be paid.” 

The “discovered assets” would appear to contradict statements by Toby Jackson, the company’s former chief technology officer and one of its only remaining executives, at the hearing that the company was effectively broke, citing one of its only assets as a $500 company laptop used by ousted CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin. Jackson noted that the company couldn’t access the laptop’s contents because Smith-Griffin had refused to share the password. AllHere listed more than $1.75 million in itemized liabilities, bankruptcy records show.

Neither Jackson, AllHere’s Delaware bankruptcy attorney, Joseph Mulvihill; trustee Miller nor his lawyer, Ricardo Palacio, responded to requests for comments. Smith-Griffin, a former Boston educator and family engagement counselor who went on to create digital tools to combat chronic absenteeism, has not spoken publicly or responded to requests for comments since her company’s sudden financial collapse this spring.

At the hearing last month, Jackson struggled to answer Miller’s questions about why AllHere paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses between September 2023 and June 2024 and owed $630,000 to its largest creditor — an education technology salesperson with longstanding ties to Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The Florida-based salesperson, Debra Kerr, said during the meeting she was never paid commission for her work closing the lucrative AllHere deal in L.A. Kerr’s son, Richard, is a former AllHere account executive who told The 74 he pitched the company to Los Angeles school leaders.

The school district “has not received any requests to date” from federal prosecutors, a district spokesperson said in a statement Monday to The 74. Los Angeles Unified School District’s independent inspector general in July launched an investigation into allegations first reported by The 74 that its much-celebrated and now-unplugged AI chatbot named “Ed” exposed students’ personal data in violation of school district policy and standard industry security practices.

Carvalho later announced that he would form his own task force to determine what went wrong with the district’s relationship with AllHere and how it could move forward incorporating AI into the nation’s second-largest school system. Carvalho and Smith-Griffin made joint appearances at ed tech conferences throughout the spring touting the capabilities of “Ed,” an animated sun they said could interact individually with and accelerate the learning for some 540,000 students and their families.

Several other creditors listed in AllHere’s bankruptcy case have ties to Carvalho, including the communications firm of his former spokesperson when he was superintendent in Miami and the Foundation for New Education Initiatives, a Florida-based nonprofit that Carvalho created in 2008. The foundation came under scrutiny in 2020 after the for-profit company K12, Inc., now known as Stride, Inc., gave the district-run entity a $1.57 million donation just a day before the school board voted to stop using its online learning platform. The donation gave an appearance of impropriety, an investigation by the Miami-Dade inspector general found, but there were “no actual violations.”

In the case of AllHere, the subpoena to the bankruptcy trustee suggests that federal prosecutors are likely “in a fairly early stage” of their investigation, attorney Wickouski said. Any indictments that could follow, she said, won’t likely be announced for months. 

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho will roll out a district-wide smartphone ban after the LAUSD school board passed a resolution calling for the prohibition.  

School board members expressed concerns over the devices’ disruptive impact on student learning and socialization, referencing a survey saying students view their own phone use as an addiction that can have a disruptive impact on academics and school climate. 

Board member Nick Melvoin, who wrote the resolution, told LA School Report concerns about students’ mental health and academic success motivated the push.  

“I spend time in schools every week, and have been struck by how often kids are on their phones,” Melvoin said. “We now have over a decade of research that shows the deleterious effects of this on all of us.”   

Melvoin’s resolution said the new policy should consider the use of storage lockers, locking pouches and technology to block social media from students’ phones. Melvoin said he hoped Carvalho’s policy would present a menu of options for schools to choose from.   

The resolution came just a few months before California lawmakers passed the statewide ‘Phone Free Schools Act,’ requiring districts across California to implement policies that limit or ban student use of cell phones during the school day. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

1. LAUSD already has a cell phone policy. 

Introduced in 2011,  LAUSD’s current cell phone policy permits students to have phones on campus but requires the devices to remain off and stored away during class. 

Melvoin said decisions regarding the enforcement of the policy have mostly been up to individual schools and teachers, and not always strictly enforced. 

With the new policy, Melvoin wants to continue to allow schools to make decisions and include parent and student voices, while also implementing specific guidelines that they must follow. 

He said he hoped the district would present a menu of options so schools would be able to choose the use of storage lockers, pouches, or an outright ban.

“We’re working with communities to actually ask them what they want,” Melvoin says. 

2. Some LAUSD schools already have policies to ban phones

A number of LAUSD schools, including Culver City High School and Lincoln High School, have already adopted approaches similar to those called for by the school board’s resolution.

According to Culver City’s parent handbook, classrooms have mandated designated areas in each classroom for students to place their phones before the course begins. A policy that is new as of the 2024-2025 school year. 

As of 2023, all teachers at LHS are provided with a 48-slot locking case that all students must place their phones in, similar to Melvoin’s proposed “menu.”

Other schools such as Gardena High School and Panorama High School and Magnets have more relaxed policies. Students at these schools are allowed to bring phones in the classroom but they must be turned off and put away, and may be confiscated if caught by a teacher. 

Tanya Ortiz-Franklin, an LAUSD board member and co-sponsor of the resolution, noticed an improvement in math scores from a school in her district that has already banned phones. 

“Students were even saying themselves, it’s nice to not feel distracted,” Ortiz-Franklin says.

With the impending ban, all high schools will be expected to update their policies in the upcoming school year.

3. The District is just months ahead of a California state ban of cell phones in the classroom, what is the rationale?

Both the state of California and LAUSD referenced studies proving that cell phones are harmful to education in their resolutions. 

‘The Phone Free Schools Act,’ referenced a paper published in May 2015 by the London School of Economics, finding that students improved in schools with cell phone bans and that lower-performing students improved exponentially. 

The state also referenced Dr. Jean Twenge’s book “iGen” which showed evidence of increased depression and mental health issues in young adults who used social media. 

In a New York Times op-ed, released the day after LAUSD passed the new resolution, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S attorney general writes that social media should require a label, warning users that the platform is, “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”

Conversations around the harms of social media are heightened now more than ever, and schools are learning to deal with increasing concerns. 

4. California is not the only state banning phones

The 2024-2025 school year marks the beginning of many new cell phone bans across the country and may mark a turning point for education in the United States.  

LAUSD is joined by Santa Barbara Unified and San Francisco Unified in cell phone bans for the 2024-2025 school year, but California is not the only state banning phones. 

Florida was the first state in May of 2023 to bar the use of cell phones, requiring districts to create policies that ban students from using phones during classes. 

Louisiana and Indiana have new policies that went into effect this year, and South Carolina, Virginia, Minnesota, and Ohio all have new rules coming online in 2025. 

Discussions around a New York City Department of Education cell phone ban have been circulating all summer, but Mayor Eric Adams, says the school is not there yet.

The new policy, set to roll out in January, is being created in response to a school board resolution.   

Studies show the unregulated use of phones on campus can harm students’ academic progress and cause harm to kids’ mental health. 

LA families and local educators are buzzing about the looming new policy, but no one is sure how it will work. 

“The first thing I thought was, how are they going to enforce that?” said Cara Becerril, a mother of a junior at Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies. “They’re going to get a lot of backlash from students and parents…I’m for it.” 

LAUSD officials said they hope the cellphone ban will reduce attention problems, cyberbullying and anxiety caused by cellphone use. Parents think that’s a good idea. 

“I’m old school, and I grew up without a phone,” Becerril said. “Humans right now can’t get off their phone, so I mean, we’ve got to start somewhere.”

Teachers told LA School Report conflicts over cellphone use can strain their relationships with students. They said they do not want sole responsibility for enforcing a ban, and they’re not sure how the devices should be managed on campus. 

“I really don’t want to be the cellphone police,” said Susan Norton, an English teacher at Verdugo Hills High School. “It’s just not a good position for teachers to be in when we’re dealing with people’s property.” 

Teachers also said students seem “addicted” to their phones. 

Rebecca Holt, a sixth grade teacher in Bel Air, has noticed students hiding their cellphones behind their books or taking bathroom breaks just to use their phone. Once LAUSD implements the cellphone ban in 2025, she hopes teachers won’t have to be the cellphone police anymore. 

Three Los Angeles school teachers shared their students’ encounters with cyberbullying. According to Holt, two students threatened to get another student killed, saying they “deserved to die.” 

While technology and social media have some negative effects on youth mental health, adolescents have reported many positive aspects. In Holt’s math classroom, students enjoy seeing where their peers go on vacation through social media.

“It helps them see other cultures and learn about the world because they’ll see their friend who went to visit Iceland, and they’ll get to see what Iceland is like,” Holt said. 

Holt also said her students sometimes watch funny videos after a long day of school as a way to decompress. But she also said that social media could have an isolating effect on kids. 

One of Holt’s middle school students, she said, decided to stop using social media entirely, and said that they felt more present in class, had stronger relationships, and enjoyed the little things in life more after quitting social media. 

Although teachers and parents voiced concerns about teens’ mental health, teens expressed confidence in how they are handling challenges that come with using devices and social media. 

Some said they feel more connected than ever through their cell phones, while other teens, like Holt’s student who quit social media, have opted out of online communities. 

Their parents were less sanguine. 

“Children are totally addicted to their phones,” said Annise Fuller, mother of a senior at Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets. “I think that the phones have taken away a lot of the children’s attention in the classroom.” 

But not all students are convinced. Although some kids told LA School Report phones can cause problems on campus, others, such as Dallas Robinson, Fuller’s daughter, said the devices are too important to bar from school.

“Don’t ban them,” said Robinson. “But make students put them in their backpacks.”

“Hice mi proyecto”, corrige la profesora María Lomeli a través de un micrófono conectado a unos altavoces situados a un lado de los que se encuentran reunidos.

Es un comienzo tranquilo del 100º día de clase en la escuela Ronald Reagan Elementary del Distrito Escolar Unificado de Desert Sands, en Palm Desert, California. Lomeli lleva cinco años trabajando en el campus, y tiene el aula preparada para fomentar un ambiente tranquilo. Mientras los alumnos cuentan cómo se sienten ese día, los altavoces reproducen una suave música de piano acompañada de sonidos de la naturaleza: el canto de los pájaros y el susurro de las hojas.

Relajada, despreocupada y bilingüe —es notable, sobre todo en el contexto de la historia de la agitada política de enseñanza de idiomas de California. De 1998 a 2016, la pacífica clase bilingüe de Lomeli probablemente habría sido ilícita, enmarcada por presiones políticas y, sobre todo, ilegal según la ley de California.

Durante la mayor parte de los últimos treinta años, los defensores de la enseñanza exclusivamente en inglés emprendieron una dura batalla a fin de impedir que las escuelas ofrecieran educación bilingüe a los estudiantes que aprenden inglés (o EL, por sus siglas en inglés) del estado. En 1998, los activistas conservadores —apoyados por una amplia mayoría de votantes blancos y votantes republicanos— impusieron un mandato de enseñar únicamente en inglés en las escuelas estatales de Kínder a grado 12, argumentando que la educación bilingüe era ineficaz para promover el desarrollo lingüístico y académico de los estudiantes EL.

Algunos alegaron que el desarrollo de idiomas que no fueran el inglés en las escuelas separaba a los niños de sus compañeros con dominio del inglés y ralentizaba la integración de los niños inmigrantes en sus escuelas y en la sociedad en general. Jaime Escalante, el maestro de Los Ángeles cuyo trabajo inspiró la película Stand and Deliver, hizo hincapié en este punto, sosteniendo que “las escuelas de California [se vieron] obligadas a utilizar la educación bilingüe a pesar de la oposición de los padres” en los años anteriores al mandato de enseñar solamente en inglés.

No obstante, los datos sobre el experimento de dar clases sólo en inglés en California fueron en gran medida desalentadores. Por eso, en el año 2016, los votantes revocaron el mandato estatal que imponía enseñar exclusivamente en inglés. Desde entonces, las escuelas de California han empezado a reconstruir —a trompicones— un nuevo sistema multilingüe de Kínder a grado 12. Esta vez, el estado está desarrollando una amplia variedad de programas bilingües —incluidos los populares modelos de inmersión en dos idiomas (o DLI, por sus siglas en inglés)— para atender a las diversas prioridades de las familias, independientemente de los idiomas que hablen en casa.

Tal vez la calma reinante en el aula de Lomeli se deba a ese cambio: las oportunidades de aprendizaje bilingüe se ofrecen ahora como una opción que las familias pueden elegir, y no como un mandato general. El educador profesional Daniel Salinero, en su cuarto año como maestro de primer grado en Reagan, así lo cree. “Una de las diferencias entre ahora y los años 90, cuando enseñaba en educación bilingüe”, dice, “es que entonces se les canalizaba de esa manera. Aquí, los padres quieren que su hijo esté en el programa”.

Hay buenas razones para que las familias elijan el DLI, una versión de la educación bilingüe en la que los estudiantes aprenden conceptos académicos en ambos idiomas y el dominio de ambas lenguas es un objetivo clave. Los estudios realizados sugieren que estos programas son la forma más eficaz de que las escuelas apoyen a los estudiantes EL, particularmente cuando son lingüísticamente equilibrados y cuentan con hablantes nativos de ambos idiomas. En California —y a lo largo del país— muchas familias que hablan predominantemente el inglés también se sienten atraídas por la posibilidad de educar a sus hijos de forma bilingüe.

Desert Sands lanzó sus programas DLI en 2019 como una forma de servir mejor a sus estudiantes que aprenden inglés, que representan más del 20 por ciento del cuerpo estudiantil de Reagan. Mientras tanto, en Jackson Elementary, el otro programa DLI del distrito, casi el 50 por ciento de los alumnos son estudiantes EL que hablan español en casa.

El primer año fue difícil —algo normal en la implementación de cualquier programa educativo nuevo—, pero la pandemia drásticamente dificultó el trabajo de los maestros. “Me trasladé de una escuela donde enseñaba en cuarto y quinto grado a estudiantes hispanohablantes a [aquí], donde enseñaba Kínder a estudiantes no hispanohablantes que no tenían ni idea de lo que estaba diciendo”, cuenta Lomeli.  “Y luego tuvimos que cerrar y me tocó enseñar en línea y…”.

Lomeli deja de hablar. Salinero añade: “Se puso peor”.

Pero a medida que la pandemia fue remitiendo y las escuelas reabrieron, los programas DLI de Desert Sands fueron avanzando hacia su plena implementación, incorporando un grado más cada otoño. Los estudiantes de Kínder que inauguraron el programa en 2019 completarán sus años de escuela primaria como alumnos de quinto grado, cada vez más bilingües, a finales del curso 2024-25.

“Creo que también ha ayudado mucho el apoyo de los padres”, afirma Juan Gutiérrez, maestro de primer grado de Reagan. “Tenemos mucha suerte de contar con eso. Todos los padres están muy involucrados… Quieren que los niños estén en el programa. No es que la escuela elija a los estudiantes. Los padres están, como, activamente buscando el programa de dos idiomas para que sus hijos puedan llegar a ser bilingües y sepan leer y escribir en ambos idiomas”.

Los responsables de Desert Sands dicen que ésta es una de las virtudes del nuevo y floreciente momento en la educación bilingüe en California: da a las familias la oportunidad de optar por programas bilingües o DLI en función de la fuerza de los numerosos valores de estos programas. El distrito aspira a que los campus DLI sean diversos y equilibrados, con un tercio de los estudiantes que domine el español, un tercio que domine el inglés y un tercio que llegue a Kínder con competencias bilingües emergentes en ambos idiomas.

Este objetivo es alcanzable aquí, en el condado de Riverside, donde más de la mitad de los hogares hablan una lengua distinta del inglés en casa. Además, el DLI funciona tal y como se prometió. En un clarividente artículo publicado en 2009, la investigadora Laurie Olsen señalaba que existe un verdadero potencial en presentar “la cultura y el idioma como activos para los niños y las familias, dos idiomas como mejores que uno y las competencias interculturales como necesarias para todos los estudiantes en una sociedad global del siglo XXI”. Al hacer de los programas bilingües una opción disponible para familias de orígenes lingüísticamente variados, en lugar de una asignación obligatoria, los líderes educativos estatales y locales han ampliado la base de apoyo político al bilingüismo.

Este enfoque está creando aulas tranquilas como la de Lomeli, pero también conlleva sus propios costos. El primero de ellos es que el profesorado bilingüe del estado se redujo considerablemente durante el periodo de enseñanza exclusivamente en inglés, y todavía no se ha invertido lo suficiente en recuperarlo. Esto dificulta el rápido crecimiento de las aulas bilingües y DLI del estado. La consiguiente escasez de cupos bilingües plantea un reto: cuando los distritos hacen sitio para las familias con dominio del inglés en sus programas DLI, pueden reducir inadvertidamente el acceso de los estudiantes EL—y las oportunidades clave para desarrollar su incipiente bilingüismo.“Tenemos una población diversa”, señala Salinero, “tenemos hablantes nativos de español y hablantes nativos de inglés, y tienen diferentes necesidades e intercambian ideas entre sí”. Al aclarar las prioridades locales desde el principio en su Plan Maestro para Estudiantes Multilingües e insistir en tratar el dominio del español y el dominio del inglés por igual como activos valiosos, el distrito está aprovechando el nuevo terreno que los votantes de California abrieron en 2016.

“Yo me siento muy feliz porque yo hace mi proyecto,” says a small blond third grader, sitting on the carpet (“I feel very happy because I does my project.”)

“Hice mi proyecto,” corrects teacher Maria Lomeli, speaking through a microphone linked to speakers set off to the side of the gathering (“I did my project”). 

It’s a calm start to the 100th day of school at Desert Sands Unified School District’s Ronald Reagan Elementary, in Palm Desert, California. It’s Lomeli’s fifth year working on campus, and she has the classroom set up to foster a tranquil atmosphere. As students share how they’re feeling that day, the speakers play gentle piano music overlaid with nature sounds—chirping birds and rustling leaves.

Relaxed, untroubled, and bilingual—it’s remarkable, particularly in the context of California’s history of roiling language education politics. From 1998 to 2016, Lomeli’s peaceful bilingual classroom would likely have been illicit, framed by political pressures, and—above all—illegal under California law.

For most of the past thirty years, English-only advocates waged a pitched battle to prevent schools from offering bilingual education to the state’s English learners (ELs). In 1998, conservative activists—supported by large majorities of white voters and Republican voters—imposed an English-only mandate on the state’s K–12 schools, arguing that bilingual education was ineffective at advancing ELs’ linguistic and academic development. 

Some argued that schools’ cultivation of non-English languages separated children from their English-dominant peers and slowed immigrant childrens’ integration into their schools and broader society. Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles teacher whose work inspired the movie Stand and Deliver, emphasized this point, arguing that “California schools [were] forced to use bilingual education despite parental opposition” in the years before the English-only mandate.

Nonetheless, the data on California’s English-only experiment were largely discouraging. That’s why, in 2016, voters repealed the statewide mandate imposing English-only education. Since then, California schools have—in fits and starts—begun to rebuild a new, multilingual K–12 system. This time, the state is growing a wide variety of bilingual programs—including popular dual language immersion (DLI) models—to appeal to a range of priorities from different families, regardless of the languages they speak at home.

Perhaps Lomeli’s classroom’s pervasive calm stems from that change—bilingual learning opportunities are now offered as an option for families to choose, rather than as a blanket mandate. Career educator Daniel Salinero, in his fourth year as a first grade teacher at Reagan, thinks so. “One of the differences between now and the ’90s, when I taught in bilingual ed,” he says, “Back then, they were kind of funneled that way. Here, the parents want their child in the program.”

There are good reasons for families to choose DLI, a version of bilingual education where students learn academic content in both languages and proficiency in both languages is a key goal. Research suggests these programs are the most effective way for schools to support ELs—particularly when they are linguistically balanced, enrolling native speakers of both languages. In California—and around the country—many English-dominant families are also attracted by the possibility of raising their children bilingually. 

Desert Sands launched its DLI programs in 2019 as a way to better serve its ELs—who make up more than 20 percent of the Reagan student body. Meanwhile, at Jackson Elementary, the district’s other DLI program, nearly 50 percent of students are ELs who speak Spanish at home. 

The first year was rocky—standard issue for the implementation of any new educational program—but the pandemic dramatically raised the difficulty of teachers’ work. “I transferred from a school where I was teaching fourth- and fifth-grade to Spanish-speaking students to [here], where I was teaching kindergarten to non-Spanish speakers who had no clue what I was saying,” says Lomeli.  “And then we had to close and I had to teach online and…” 

She trails off. Salinero offers, “It got worse.” 

But as the pandemic wound down and campuses reopened, Desert Sands’ DLI programs moved towards full implementation, growing by one grade each fall. The kindergarteners who inaugurated the program in 2019 will round out their elementary school years as increasingly bilingual fifth-graders at the end of the 2024–25 year. 

“I think also what has helped a lot is the parental support,” says Reagan first-grade teacher Juan Gutierrez. “We’re very lucky to have that. All the parents are very invested…They want the kids to be in the program. It’s not like the students are being chosen by the school. The parents are, like, actively seeking the dual language program so their kids can become bilingual and biliterate.”

Desert Sands leaders say that this is one of the virtues of California’s new, burgeoning bilingual education moment: it gives families the chance to opt into bilingual or DLI programs on the strength of these programs’ many virtues. The district aims for diverse, balanced DLI campuses with one-third of students who are Spanish-dominant, one-third who are English-dominant, and one-third who arrive in kindergarten with emerging bilingual proficiencies in both languages. 

This is an achievable goal here, in Riverside County, where over half of households speak a non-English language at home. This is also DLI operating precisely as promised. In a prescient 2009 article, researcher Laurie Olsen noted, there is real potential in presenting “culture and language as assets for children and families, two languages as better than one, and cross-cultural competencies as necessary for all students in a 21st-century global society.” By making bilingual programs a choice available to families of linguistically varied backgrounds, rather than a mandatory assignment, state and local education leaders have broadened the base of political support for bilingualism. 

That approach is creating calm classrooms like Lomeli’s, but it also carries costs. Foremost among them: the state’s bilingual teaching force shrank considerably during its English-only period, and it has not yet invested enough in building it back. This makes it difficult to rapidly regrow the state’s bilingual and DLI classrooms. The resulting scarcity of bilingual seats produces a challenge: when districts make room for English-dominant families in their DLI programs, they may inadvertently reduce English learners’ access—and key opportunities to develop their emerging bilingualism. 

“We have a diverse population,” says Salinero, “we have native Spanish-speakers and native English-speakers, and they have different needs and they bounce ideas off of each other.” By clarifying local priorities from the start in its Multilingual Learner Master Plan and insisting on treating Spanish proficiency and English proficiency alike as valuable assets, the district is taking advantage of new terrain California voters opened up in 2016. 

Ten Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) community schools will be given an opportunity to pilot new approaches to assessments in the 2025-26 academic year. 

And once the schools adopt alternative assessments, they won’t have to participate in standardized tests, other than those mandated by state and federal governments, the district school board decided in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. 

The policy, which comes as part of the Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the LAUSD Community Schools Initiative, was authored by LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg and board members Rocio Rivas and Kelly Gonez. 

Goldberg said that over the past several decades, corporate entities have turned education’s focus away from cultivating a love for learning — and toward test taking, which she believes has become the “be-all and judge-all of schools.” 

She emphasized that multiple choice, standardized assessments are not the only way to gauge students’ learning. 

“I knew where my students were, what they could read, what they understood, what they didn’t — because that’s what you do when you teach,” Goldberg said, adding that class discussions and projects can also be used to observe progress. “You’re continuously assessing.”

Once the 10 community schools establish new “innovative, authentic, rigorous and relevant” methods of assessment, they will not be required to administer the district’s iReady diagnostic tests, which teachers have criticized for taking up large chunks of instructional time. 

Rivas said students would be relieved of some of the anxiety and stress that comes from ongoing standardized testing. She read several messages she had received from students in the district during Tuesday’s meeting.

“If we already take five state tests … in the end of the year, why do we take the end of the year iReady?” one student wrote in a letter to Rivas. “They both are the same reason: to show you what we know.” 

“I was really stressed out — worrying about all of these tests. I also gained a lot of anxiety since testing started, and I could not focus on my own life because I was so stressed.” 

LAUSD board member George McKenna, however, opposed the measure, questioning how students are supposed to learn without being given tests to work toward. He added that the initiative has “promise” but that he did not trust the policy would be implemented properly. 

Board members Tanya Ortiz Franklin and Nick Melvoin also voted against the resolution — which will require LAUSD to establish a Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning Initiative that community schools can apply to be part of. 

Schools that are part of the initiative would have to select a community school “lead tacher” who is grant funded and would receive additional professional development from both Community School Coaches and UCLA Center for Community Schooling, among others. 

The 10 schools in the cohort, according to the resolution, will also have to adapt their instructional programs to “integrate culturally relevant curriculum, community- and project-based learning, and civic engagement.”

“This is just one step,” Gonez said during Tuesday’s meeting. “But I really look forward to the way this resolution will be implemented — to see what innovative ideas that I know our teachers have and see how we may be able to pilot a more joyful education, a transformative education, which really brings the community schools model to full fruition.” 

Knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school, the workers told parents of assistance the district could offer with transportation, school supplies, and even clothing. 

The effort, a standard strategy for LAUSD at this point, was designed and implemented by the district after the pandemic, when the number of students deemed chronically absent reached nearly half of total enrollment.  

Since then, the number of kids missing class has fallen, but it’s still nearly one-third of all students, so LA Unified has continued its push, said superintendent Alberto Carvalho. 

“The first priority is having kids at school,” he said. “We need kids in school.” 

Both for academic and financial reasons, as it turns out. 

Rates of chronic absenteeism – defined by the district as missing ten percent or more of a school year – exploded in the pandemic, with nearly half of students missing that much class.   

Prior to the pandemic, the fire had already started. In the two years before Covid,  percent of students deemed chronically absent jumped from 13% to more than 18%. When school returned after shutdowns it rose to nearly half of all students.

The situation in LA wasn’t unique. But it threatened both academic and financial standing of the district, as well as endangering the lives of children who missed school. And causes for the persistent problem are complex, said Victor Flores, principal of John H. Liechty Middle School in Westlake.  

“Sometimes it’s the parents that are working long hours, double jobs, and so it’s hard to get them to and from school,” said Flores. “Sometimes it’s chronic illnesses that some students may have. There may be mental illness or other issues in the family.” 

Even though daily attendance in LAUSD is rising, rates of chronic absenteeism stood at nearly one-third of students at the end of the last academic year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. Officials in Los Angeles, around the state and even the rest of the country don’t see a full recovery any time soon. 

Here’s what’s to know about the sticky issue and how it affects LA Unified: 

1. No easy fixes for a long-term problem impacting LA’s most vulnerable students 

In L.A. Unified, just over 45% of students were chronically absent in 2021-22. The percentage dropped to 36.5% in 2022-23. The preliminary rate for the 2023-24 school shows improvement to 32.3%, but that’s still way above historic norms — and Carvalho said yearly, incremental gains will be how the district digs itself out.  

“Some of the challenges faced by these families transcend that which the school system can address,” said Carvalho.  

The students impacted by the problem are the city’s neediest, said Graciela Ortiz, field coordinator for pupil services and attendance. Data kept by the district show homeless kids, poor kids and students with disabilities are far more likely to be absent. Likewise for kindergartners and pre-kindergarteners entering the system, and high school kids.

“It’s our working-class families and low-income communities that are affected the most by attendance issues,” said Ortiz. “After the pandemic, it’s as if those barriers [that prevent kids from getting to class] were just exacerbated.”  

2. Showing up for class makes nine times the difference when it comes to LAUSD  academics 

Research has long shown chronic absenteeism is bad for academics. And showing up for class is good. But LAUSD has now quantified just how important this is, Carhvalho said at a press conference given at Venice High School on the first day of class. 

“For every one percent of daily attendance improvement, particularly for the most fragile students, we see a nine percent improvement in academic performance,” Carvalho said. The calculations were made with principals from 100 schools that are fighting the problem, he said.  

3. Chronic absenteeism creates a financial problem in LA Unified, too  

Unlike many other large states that look more aggressively at enrollment, California uses attendance as a weighty measure to make decisions about school funding, said Carvalho. For every 1% of improved attendance in the district, that’s an additional $60 million in state funding it would receive, he said. So students who don’t go to class regularly “actually deflate the total potential revenue for all students in the district,” he said. 

Like other districts, Los Angeles is under financial pressure and is trying to avoid closing schools amid enrollment declines. Given those circumstances, Carvalho said, the money is more important than ever, even if the district managed to avoid layoffs this year.  

4. LA Unified’s novel toolbox to fight absenteeism includes “concierge” bussing for kids who miss class

The complex causes of chronic absenteeism demand a complex response. So LAUSD is using an array of tools at the problem, including “concierge” transportation that’s “almost door-to-door,” Carvalho said. Transportation is one of the most challenging obstacles in getting kids to class, so the district is rerouting its bus lines to pick up students as close to their homes as possible. “We’re constantly rerouting,” said the superintendent.

Customized bus routes are just part of the package. The district is continuing with home visits, attendance counselors at each school, and provides wraparound social services meant to boost attendance, such counseling, medical care, or even laundry. Other novel approaches include trying to make school fun, for example, and principals taking the time to talk to parents individually at pickup and dropoff.     

La combinación de las inversiones públicas en el sistema de la Universidad de California y la actitud hospitalaria del estado hacia la inmigración han creado una economía dinámica y dotada de tecnología que es la más grande de todos los estados norteamericanos. Su diverso sistema de educación pública también refleja ese dinamismo, y atiende a más estudiantes que aprenden inglés (o EL, por sus siglas en inglés) que las escuelas de cualquier otro estado. En 2021, California matriculó a más estudiantes EL en grados de Kínder a 12 que todos los alumnos en el estado de Indiana.

Sin embargo, de 1998 a 2016, en medio de una creciente ansiedad por la inmigración a finales de la década de los 90, las escuelas del estado contradijeron su reputación cosmopolita, promulgando una normativa para que se enseñara exclusivamente en inglés a los estudiantes EL. Como era de esperar, la política hizo poco para cambiar la trayectoria demográfica del estado y menos aún para mejorar el aprendizaje de los alumnos.

Por esa razón, en el año 2016, los votantes de California aprobaron la Proposición 58 en un referéndum que volvía a plantear la posibilidad de la educación bilingüe para los EL de California. Los partidarios promovieron la medida como una oportunidad para que el estado ofreciera un sistema escolar multilingüe acorde con su reputación de sociedad plural y diversa que preparara a los estudiantes para prosperar en la economía global.

Este artículo es el primero en una serie de The 74 sobre los esfuerzos de California por construir un sistema educativo bilingüe digno de su reputación de diversidad cultural. 

Ocho años después de la aprobación de la Proposición 58, los avances hacia esa visión han sido desiguales. La eliminación activa de idiomas en las aulas del estado durante casi dos décadas ha dado lugar a innumerables desafíos. Aun así, la adopción del bilingüismo por parte del estado ha acercado la narrativa pública a la opinión general de la investigación sobre los beneficios del aprendizaje de varios idiomas. California lanzó el Sello de Biliteracidad, que ahora se ha extendido a nivel nacional, y que otorga reconocimiento público a los graduados de Kínder hasta el grado 12 que demuestren competencia en más de un idioma. Esfuerzos de este tipo son los que están cambiando el discurso público en California sobre los idiomas y aumentando la demanda de oportunidades de aprendizaje bilingüe.

Reductos bilingües en una era monolingüe

En 1998, cuando California adoptó la Proposición 58 y su política de enseñar únicamente en inglés, algunas encuestas daban a entender que aproximadamente la mitad de los votantes latinos apoyaban el mandato. Las encuestas a pie de urna posteriores sugerían una historia algo más complicada, pero la medida se aprobó igualmente.

El número de estudiantes EL en aulas de educación bilingüe bajó casi un 70 por ciento entre 1998 y 2003. Aunque la nueva política de enseñar sólo en inglés permitía a las comunidades ofrecer educación bilingüe si un número suficiente de padres de estudiantes EL optaban por no participar en una educación exclusivamente en inglés, sólo una pequeña parte de las escuelas pudo alcanzar ese umbral. El español, el coreano, el japonés, el cantonés y otros idiomas que no fueran el inglés desaparecieron de las escuelas.

Pero la decisión del estado no borró el deseo de muchos californianos de que se reconocieran y se trabajaran en la escuela las habilidades bilingües que sus hijos empezaban a demostrar. La persistente demanda de los padres latinos puso en marcha y/o mantuvo programas bilingües y de inmersión en dos idiomas, como el campus en Burlington del Camino Nuevo Charter Academy de Los Ángeles.

La escuela abrió sus puertas en el año 2000; el interés de la comunidad por el bilingüismo empujó a los líderes a dar prioridad al desarrollo de los alumnos tanto en inglés como en español. “Recibíamos niños que venían de programas que estaban por toda la ciudad”, dice la ex directora general de Camino Nuevo, Ana Ponce. “Y los padres querían que sus hijos mantuvieran su lengua materna. No estábamos sujetos a las limitaciones de la Proposición 227 porque éramos una escuela chárter, así que nos embarcamos en la exploración de diferentes modelos de educación bilingüe”.

La escuela optó por un modelo de inmersión en dos idiomas (o DLI, por sus siglas en inglés) que comienza con la mayoría de la enseñanza en español y aumenta paulatinamente la enseñanza en inglés hasta que los dos idiomas están equilibrados en los últimos grados de primaria. Décadas más tarde, el campus del centro de Los Ángeles bulle con conversaciones que cambian del español al inglés. Los alumnos de cuarto grado practican en parejas problemas de división en su clase de matemáticas jugando a Piedra, Papel o Tijeras para decidir quién va primero.

“Ojalá, Dios quiera que no, que no desaparezcan estas escuelas, ¿verdad? Porque les ayuda mucho a nuestros hijos de verdad”, comenta Maribel Martínez, una madre de Camino Nuevo desde hace 13 años. “No hablo mal de las [escuelas] del distrito, sé que también enseñan bien, pero pues el único error es de que pues quitaron el bilingüe… los dos idiomas valen mucho y más”.

Parte de ese valor es de carácter académico. Las investigaciones sugieren que los programas de inmersión en dos idiomas son la mejor manera de apoyar a los jóvenes que no son hablantes nativos de inglés en las escuelas de Estados Unidos. Pero los padres de la escuela Camino dicen que ésta es sólo una de las razones por las que valoran las destrezas emergentes de sus hijos en español e inglés. El primer hijo de Gloribel Reyes empezó en la escuela hace veinte años y el menor está matriculado en cuarto grado. “Es muy importante que los niños pues siempre tengan ese aprendizaje de lo que es el español y el bilingüe”, precisa, “porque si ellos aprenden nada más el inglés, pues se les va olvidando [el español], que es lo que hablamos los papás, porque si unos papás no hablamos[…] inglés, entonces ¿cómo nos podemos comunicar con ellos?”

Martínez está de acuerdo, y señala que el bilingüismo de la escuela facilita a las familias hispanohablantes el contacto con los maestros y el personal. Es decir, el esfuerzo de Burlington por contratar a personal para el programa DLI durante décadas ha dado lugar a una plantilla totalmente bilingüe.

Tras años de servicio como escuela al frente de la educación bilingüe, Camino Nuevo se ha convertido en una cantera bilingüe de la que otras escuelas pueden sacar provecho. Kylie Rector, Directora de Biliteracidad y Estudiantes EL de Camino Nuevo, dice que “el entusiasmo por invertir más en educación bilingüe” ha atraído a la escuela administradores de distintos distritos, desde San Diego hasta el norte de California.

No obstante, aunque se están reanudando programas bilingües y de inmersión en dos idiomas por todo el estado, en ningún lugar están creciendo lo suficientemente rápido como para cumplir con el objetivo del estado para 2030 de construir un sistema de al menos 1.600 programas de DLI para hacer que “la mitad de todos los estudiantes de Kínder a grado 12… participen en programas que lleven a la competencia en dos o más idiomas”. El año pasado, el estado dedicó 10 millones de dólares en nuevas subvenciones para poner en marcha nuevas escuelas de DLI; el estado calcula que con este dinero se crearán 55 programas nuevos.

Esto se debe, en parte, a que la prohibición durante dieciocho años de la mayoría de los programas bilingües en California prácticamente eliminó el mercado laboral para los maestros bilingües. Es por eso que los sistemas escolares de Kínder a grado 12 produjeron más graduados monolingües, cuyo idioma dominante fue el inglés, y por esta razón también los programas de formación de maestros bilingües del estado cerraron en gran medida.

Esto supone para los dirigentes de California el problema de la gallina y el huevo. No pueden aumentar las aulas bilingües en todo el estado sin más profesores bilingües, pero el sistema estatal de enseñanza primaria y secundaria sigue siendo mayoritariamente sólo en inglés y no está produciendo suficientes graduados bilingües para aumentar rápidamente la diversidad lingüística del profesorado del estado. Como resultado, el cuerpo docente de Kínder a grado 12 de California es mucho más blanco y monolingüe en su lengua materna, el inglés, que la población estudiantil primaria y secundaria de California. Sólo el 27 por ciento de los maestros de California habla una lengua distinta del inglés en casa, en comparación con el 40 por ciento de los alumnos de Kínder a grado 12 de California.

El aumento de la demanda de educadores bilingües también ha hecho que el personal de Camino Nuevo sea muy valioso en el sector de la educación pública de California. Algunos antiguos empleados de Camino Nuevo han acabado fundando sus propias escuelas bilingües, como Sue Park, fundadora de Yu Ming Public Charter School. Otros trabajan en escuelas del Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles y otros distritos de California. Y otros trabajan en defensa de la educación en organizaciones sin fines de lucro como Great Public Schools Now, TNTP, Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, NewSchools y la Fundación Cesar Chavez.

La polinización cruzada del bilingüismo en el condado de San Diego

A sólo diez millas en carro del cruce fronterizo de San Ysidro entre Estados Unidos y México, el campus de Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School (CVLCC) es otro hervidero de bilingüismo. La escuela fue fundada por el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Chula Vista en 1998 como una forma de mantener las opciones bilingües una vez que llegó el mandato estatal de enseñar exclusivamente en inglés.

Eddie Caballero se incorporó a CVLCC un año después como profesor de quinto grado. “Fue un comienzo difícil”, asegura, ya que la escuela luchaba por centrar sus enfoques de instrucción académica y lingüística. Pero ya para 2004, la escuela se había unido en torno a una visión: poner énfasis adicional en las habilidades básicas de alfabetización temprana en ambos idiomas simultáneamente.

En 2005, Caballero se trasladó al Distrito Escolar Unificado de San Diego para trabajar en puestos administrativos. En 2008, varias familias de estudiantes EL se estaban organizando para firmar exenciones con el fin de iniciar un programa de educación bilingüe en Sherman Elementary, en la zona este de San Diego. La escuela necesitaba un educador bilingüe con experiencia; Caballero encajaba a la perfección. Estaba ansioso por utilizar lo que había aprendido en CVLCC para replicar la educación bilingüe de alta calidad, pero ahora a nivel de distrito.

Al igual que en CVLCC, “no tuvimos éxito inmediatamente”, dice Caballero. Avisa que cualquier programa de educación bilingüe no tendrá éxito automáticamente por el mero hecho de ser bilingüe. Con demasiada frecuencia, advierte, los responsables de los distritos piensan que pueden “reinventar” sus escuelas lanzando programas de DLI, “pero no, hay que implementarlo con cuidado”. Esto requiere una planeación cuidadosa en torno al plan de estudios, la dotación de personal, los esfuerzos de participación familiar y mucho más. Es por eso que, en 2016, Caballero contrató a Nicole Enriquez, ex maestra de CVLCC, para ser su subdirectora; ella asumió el papel de directora cuando él dejó el Distrito Escolar Unificado de San Diego.

Ahora, en 2024, Caballero está de vuelta como director general de CVLCC, que sigue sirviendo como motor para el ecosistema local de educación bilingüe. Precisa que los maestros bilingües suelen acudir a su escuela desde distritos cercanos con el objetivo de desarrollar su experiencia enseñando en entornos bilingües o de inmersión en dos idiomas. Sin embargo, muchos se van al cabo de cinco años, porque quedarse más tiempo les costaría la antigüedad contractual en los distritos donde empezaron su carrera.

“CVLCC es una escuela bilingüe ejemplar que no sólo tiene un plan de estudios cultural y lingüísticamente sensible, sino que también prepara la conciencia crítica global de los estudiantes a través de enfoques innovadores e impactantes”, precisa Cristina Alfaro. “En sus inicios… la llamábamos la Escuela de los Sueños”.

Reconstrucción

En los 26 años transcurridos desde que los votantes de California inauguraron la era monolingüe en su estado -y ocho años después de que acabaran con ella- está claro que el terreno de la opinión pública ha cambiado. Las encuestas realizadas antes del referéndum de la Proposición 58 de 2016 revelaban que más de dos tercios de los votantes latinos de California apoyaban la restauración de la educación bilingüe. 

Mientras tanto, una encuesta de Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors que tuvo lugar en el 2023 encontró que el 65 por ciento de las familias latinas “inscribirían a sus hijos en un programa bilingüe si estuviera disponible”. En otra encuesta realizada en 2023 entre californianos mayoritariamente hispanohablantes, Keep Learning California descubrió que el 59 por ciento de los encuestados consideraba el “acceso a programas bilingües” una prioridad “esencial” o “alta” para sus familias.

Baluartes bilingües como CVLCC y Camino Nuevo son recursos esenciales para ayudar a que esa esperanza sea realista para más de esas familias. “Soy chicana de segunda generación”, dice la directora Enríquez de la escuela Sherman. “Y esta generación de padres dice cosas como: ‘Yo nunca tuve esta oportunidad cuando era niño. Ojalá pudiera hablar más español. Quiero que mis hijos puedan ser bilingües, que tengan la oportunidad que yo nunca tuve’. ¡Y yo también soy así! Yo traje a mis hijos aquí, a través de Sherman, para que pudieran ser bilingües”.

California is, by almost every measure, one of the United States’ most diverse and vibrant states. The country’s most populous state, it also has no majority racial or ethnic group. 

The combination of public investments in the University of California system and the state’s welcoming approach to immigration have created a dynamic, technology-infused economy that is the largest of any U.S. state. Its diverse public education system also reflects that dynamism, serving more English learners (ELs) than schools in any other state. In 2021, California enrolled more K–12 ELs than Indiana enrolled students. 

And yet, from 1998 to 2016, the state’s schools belied its cosmopolitan reputation, enacting an English-only mandate for ELs amid a late-1990s surge in anxiety about immigration. Unsurprisingly, the policy did little to change the state’s demographic trajectory — and even less to improve student learning. 

That’s why California voters passed Proposition 58 in 2016, a referendum that reopened the possibility of bilingual education for California’s ELs. Supporters sold the measure as an opportunity for the state to deliver a multilingual school system befitting its reputation as a plural and diverse society preparing students to succeed in the global economy. 

This is the first in The 74‘s series on California’s effort to build a bilingual education system worthy of its culturally diverse reputation. 

Eight years after Prop. 58’s passage, progress towards that vision has been uneven. Nearly two decades of actively subtracting languages from the state’s classrooms created myriad challenges. And yet, the state’s embrace of bilingualism has brought public narratives closer to the research consensus on the benefits of learning multiple languages. California launched the now-national Seal of Biliteracy, which provides public recognition for K–12 graduates who demonstrate proficiency in more than one language. Efforts like these are changing California’s public discourse around languages and increasing demand for bilingual learning opportunities. 

Part 1: An 18- year ban on Bilingual Education in California begins

When Proposition 227 made California an English-only state in 1998, some polling suggested that roughly half of Latino voters supported the move. Subsequent exit polls suggested a somewhat more complicated story, but the measure passed all the same. 

The number of ELs in bilingual education classrooms dropped by nearly 70 percent from 1998 to 2003. While the new English-only policy permitted communities to offer bilingual education if enough ELs’ parents “opted out” of English-only education, only a small fraction of schools were able to meet that threshold. Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and other non-English languages vanished from schools. 

But the state’s decision didn’t erase many Californians’ desire to have their children’s emerging bilingual abilities recognized and cultivated at school. Persistent demand from Latino parents launched and/or maintained bilingual and DLI programs, such as Los Angeles’ Camino Nuevo Charter Academy’s Burlington campus. 

The school opened in 2000; community interest in bilingualism pushed leaders to prioritize students’ development in both English and Spanish. “We were getting kids that were coming from programs that were all over the city,” says former Camino Nuevo CEO Ana Ponce. “And parents wanted their kids to keep their native language. We were not bound by Proposition 227’s limitations because we were a charter, so we embarked on exploring different bilingual education models.” 

The school settled on a DLI model that begins with a majority of instruction in Spanish and gradually increases English-language instruction until the languages are evenly balanced in later elementary grades. Decades later, the Central Los Angeles campus effervesces with chatter swinging from Spanish to English. Fourth-graders pair off to practice division problems in math class to decide who goes first by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors or Piedra, Papel, Tijeras. 

“I hope that God keeps these schools from disappearing, because they really help our children,” says 13-year Camino Nuevo parent Maribel Martinez in Spanish. “I don’t want to talk down the district’s schools, they also teach well, but their big mistake was cutting bilingual education…two languages are worth so much.” 

Some of that value is academic. Research suggests that dual language immersion programs are the best way to support young, non-native English speakers in U.S. schools. But Camino parents say that this is only one of the reasons they prize their children’s emerging Spanish and English skills. Gloribel Reyes’ first child started at the school twenty years ago and her youngest is enrolled in fourth grade. “It’s very important that the children learn both Spanish and English,” she says in Spanish, “because if they only learn English, they forget their own language, the language their parents speak. Some of their parents don’t speak English—how can we speak with them?”

Martinez agrees—and notes that the school’s bilingualism makes it easier for Spanish-dominant families to engage with teachers and staff. That is, decades of hiring to staff Burlington’s DLI program have produced a fully bilingual staff. 

After years of serving as a bilingual outpost, Camino Nuevo has become a bilingual quarry for other schools to mine. Kylie Rector, Camino Nuevo’s Director of Biliteracy and English Learners, says that “the buzz to invest more in bilingual education” has brought administrators from districts from San Diego to Northern California to the school. 

Still, while bilingual and dual language immersion (DLI) programs are relaunching across the state, they are not growing anywhere fast enough to meet the state’s 2030 goal of building a system of at least 1,600 DLI programs to have “half of all K–12 students…participate in programs leading to proficiency in two or more languages.” Last year, the state devoted $10 million in new grant support for launching new DLI schools — the state estimates it will produce 55 new programs. 

This is partly because California’s eighteen-year ban on most bilingual programs also flatlined the job market for bilingual teachers. This meant that K–12 school systems produced more monolingual, English-dominant graduates, and it meant that the state’s bilingual teacher training programs largely shuttered. 

This presents California leaders with a chicken-and-egg problem. They cannot grow bilingual classrooms around the state without more bilingual teachers, but the state’s K–12 system remains mostly English-only and is not producing enough bilingual graduates to rapidly grow the linguistic diversity of the state’s teaching force. As a result, California’s K–12 teaching force is much whiter and more native English-speaking monolingual than California’s K–12 student body. Just 27 percent of California teachers speak a non-English language at home, compared to 40 percent of California K–12 students. 

The increased demand for bilingual educators has also made Camino Nuevo staff valuable across California’s public education sector. Some erstwhile Camino Nuevo employees have gone on to launch dual language schools of their own, like Yu Ming Public Charter School founder Sue Park. Others are working in schools across LAUSD and other California districts. Still others are working in education advocacy at non-profit organizations like Great Public Schools Now, TNTP, Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, NewSchools, and the Cesar Chavez Foundation. 

Cross-Pollinating Bilingualism in San Diego County

Just a ten mile drive from the U.S.-Mexico San Ysidro border crossing, Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School’s (CVLCC) campus is another hotbed of bilingualism. The school was founded by the Chula Vista Unified School District in 1998 as a way to maintain bilingual options once the state’s English-only mandate arrived. 

Eddie Caballero joined CVLCC a year later as a 5th grade teacher. “It was a rough start,” he says, as the school struggled to focus its academic and linguistic instructional approaches. But by 2004, the school had coalesced around a vision — putting extra campus emphasis on foundational early literacy skills in both languages simultaneously. 

In 2005, Caballero moved to San Diego Unified School District to work in administrative roles. In 2008, a number of families of ELs were organizing to sign waivers to start a bilingual education program at Sherman Elementary, on San Diego’s east side. The school needed an experienced bilingual educator; Caballero was a natural fit. He was eager to use what he’d learned at CVLCC to replicate high-quality bilingual education — now in a district setting. 

Just as at CVLCC, “We didn’t see success immediately,” Caballero says. He warns that just any bilingual education program won’t automatically succeed just by virtue of being bilingual. Too often, he warns, district leaders think they can “rebrand” their schools by launching DLI programs, “but no, you have to implement it carefully.” This requires careful planning around curriculum, staffing, family engagement efforts, and much more. That’s why, in 2016, Caballero hired former CVLCC teacher Nicole Enriquez to be his assistant principal; she stepped in as principal when he left San Diego Unified. 

Now, in 2024, Caballero is back as CVLCC’s CEO, which continues to serve as a flywheel for the local bilingual education ecosystem. He says that bilingual teachers often come to his school from nearby districts with the goal of developing their expertise teaching in bilingual or DLI settings. However, many leave after five years, because staying longer would cost them contractual seniority back in the districts where they began their careers. 

“CVLCC is an exemplary dual language school that not only has a culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum—but also prepares students’ global critical consciousness through innovative and impactful approaches,” says Cristina Alfaro. “At its inception…we called it the Dream School.”

Building Back

In the 26 years since California voters launched their state’s monolingual era — and eight years since they ended it — it’s clear that the ground of public opinion has shifted. Polling before the 2016 Proposition 58 referendum found that more than two-thirds of California Latino voters supported restoring bilingual education. 

Meanwhile, a 2023 Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors survey found that 65% of Latino families “would enroll their children in a bilingual program if it were available.” In a separate 2023 poll of mostly Spanish-dominant Californians, Keep Learning California found that 59% of respondents listed “access to bilingual programs” as an “essential” or “high” priority for their families. 

Bilingual strongholds like CVLCC and Camino Nuevo are essential resources for helping make that hope realistic for more of those families. “I’m second-generation Chicana,” says Sherman principal Enriquez. “And this generation of parents says things like, ‘I never got this opportunity as a kid. I wish that I could speak more Spanish. I want my kids to be able to be bilingual, to get the opportunity that I never had.’ And I’m that parent too! I brought my kids here, through Sherman, so they could be bilingual.”

Getting students hooked on classic games is one way Principal Sham Bevel has tried to soothe their separation anxiety after the district banned cellphones two years ago. At Bayside, students must keep the devices in their lockers during school hours.

But convincing kids there’s something better than posting TikTok videos or browsing friends’ Instagram posts is an ongoing struggle.

“Cellphones are to children what the blanket was to Linus,” Bevel quipped.

Cellphone bans during school hours have gained momentum in recent months, with states like Virginia, Ohio and  South Carolina taking action and the Los Angeles and New York districts moving in that direction.

But schools may find that deciding to remove phones is the easy part. The real test is finding a way to secure and store them that both staff and families find acceptable. Complete bans leave some parents nervous, but partial restrictions often put teachers in the uncomfortable position of policing the rules during valuable class time. 

“All of these have pluses and minuses,” said Todd Reid, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. The agency is gathering public comments on how best to implement Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s July 9 executive order to have phone restrictions in place by Jan 1. Officials will release guidance in mid-September. “All of them really come down to how the policies are implemented.”

One approach to banning phones, storing them in students’ lockers, can be hard to enforce, said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement.

“Teachers say that students ask to go to the bathroom and then go get their phones,” she said. “It still allows negative activities to happen between classes — cyberbullying, planning fights and others videoing them.” 

Sheila Kelly, a board member for Arlington Parents for Education, a Virginia advocacy group, raised another practical issue: Not all schools have lockers. What’s most important to her is that schools restrict phone use not just in class, but during breaks.

“It’s during those in-between times … that students can experience the mental health advantages of phone-free interactions, allowing them to grow socially and emotionally,” she said.

‘Loopholes’ 

A growing number of schools say Yondr pouches, which cost about $25 per student, accomplish that goal. 

The neoprene sleeves, often used at live music and comedy events, lock with a magnetic closure and can be reopened with a device usually mounted near a school exit. Districts among the company’s top customers include Cincinnati and Nashville, according to GovSpend, a data company. 

In June, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed a budget that includes $250,000 for a Yondr pilot program in middle and high schools this fall. Last year, the company earned $3 million in government contracts — doubling its business from 2022, GovSpend shows.

In New York City, where Chancellor David Banks is currently hammering out the details of a ban expected next year, some teachers prefer Yondr because it takes them out of the enforcement business: Students lock up their phones in a pouch when they come to school in the morning and can’t remove them until they leave in the afternoon.

Vinny Corletta, a Bronx English teacher, used to work in a school where teachers employed incentives to discourage phone use. Kids could rack up points for prizes — from pencils to  sneakers. But frequent reminders still took time away from instruction.

“I’m a teacher; I don’t want to hold 30 cellphones for students all day,.” he said. 

Now he teaches at Middle School 137, where students put their phones in a Yondr pouch when they arrive and then store them in their backpacks. He thinks that even if they can’t access their phones, students prefer having them close by rather than in a locker or classroom storage container.

But no method is foolproof. Students have been known to disable Yondr locks or even surrender a dead older phone while stowing their current model in a backpack. 

“Kids are so smart — sometimes more than adults — and always find loopholes,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that provides support services to students in low-income schools. 

He’s worried about students being “policied, patrolled and punished” for violations, recalling the Los Angeles district’s failed iPad rollout in 2013. Students easily broke through the security firewall and used the iPads to play online games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run. The district stopped allowing students to take them home.

“I thought the district should’ve hired those kids … to teach district staff about technology security,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if schools exhaust their energy trying to implement this ban.”

Los Angeles officials have until October to specify how they’ll enforce a ban the board approved in June. 

But some L.A. students think adults have blown the issue out of proportion. Alejandro Casillas, who will enter 11th grade at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles this fall, said teachers already confiscate phones if they see them more than once during class or offer extra credit to limit use. He gave up his phone once to get the additional points. 

“I think this image of phones being a distraction is over-exaggerated,” he said. “If the district were to take away cellphones, I think some students would still be distracted.”

Students might think they’re good at multitasking, but experts say that allowing them access to phones in class prevents them from focusing deeply on their lessons. Research also points to increases in test scores following phone bans.

Israel Beltran, a rising sophomore at Mendez High School, said he doesn’t use his phone in class except when teachers allow it during breaks. At that point, he often turns to funny videos on YouTube. But the idea of a total ban makes him feel like he’s back in elementary school. 

“When we had a toy or something we shouldn’t bring to school, they usually would take it away from us and give it back at the end of the day,” he said. 

‘A lifeline’

Parents have been among the most divided over districts’ efforts to ban students’ phones. The Phone-Free Schools Movement has a team of 80 ambassadors across the country, mostly parents who track district policies and promote cellphone bans for students in their communities. 

But a recent national survey from the National Parents Union showed that while parents support “reasonable limits” on use, a majority — 56% — think students should occasionally have access during school hours.

That’s especially true for parents whose children have disabilities or health issues.

In Los Angeles, Ariel Harman-Holmes doesn’t want an across-the-board ban. She was afraid her son, who will enter sixth grade at the Science Academy STEM Magnet this fall, would lose a phone. So she gave him an Apple Watch, with its own number and data plan. With ADHD and a condition called face blindness, he sometimes can’t recognize people or even familiar places — a limitation that was especially stressful when people wore masks during the pandemic. 

“He couldn’t even tell who was an adult and who was a child. He didn’t know who to trust,” she said. One day he used his watch to call his parents, who helped him get reoriented. Now she plans to have use of the watch written into his special education plan as an accommodation. “I feel like kids with certain disorders or disabilities, like autism, anxiety, possibly depression, need a lifeline to their parents.”

Regardless of which method districts adopt, parents have found that enforcement can be inconsistent. 

Victoria Gordon, whose son Malik attends Republic High School, a Nashville charter, supports leaders’ efforts to minimize use during class. The school’s official policy prohibits students from accessing social media during school hours. But visiting one day last year, she saw her son using his phone in class.  Sometimes, she glimpses photos he posts during school hours.

“Why is my child on Instagram at 10 o’clock in the morning?” she asked. “They’re not implementing what they’re saying.”

The 74 wants to hear from educators, parents and students on how cellphone bans in your states, districts and schools are going. Please take this short survey to help inform our future reporting.

At the time, principals with Boston Impact Initiative were finalizing the firm’s annual impact assessment of AllHere, a 2016 startup that offered a tech-driven solution to chronic student absences. Officials with the equity-focused investment firm were left with an impression that was, it turns out, far from reality. 

“There were conversations with the company and it was doing really well,” CEO Betty Francisco told The 74 in a brief telephone conversation earlier this month.  

AllHere was actually on the verge of collapse and now, Francisco is questioning whether her firm may have been played. 

“We are trying to also understand what happened,” she said of the news that the company, the recipient of some $12 million in investor capital and much praise for being an AI education innovator, was in serious straits. Last month, a majority of its staff were furloughed, AllHere announced on its website; the ambitious AI chatbot that it built for the Los Angeles Unified School District was unplugged and its founder and chief executive officer, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was out of a job. 

Francisco said her firm was a minor player in AllHere’s venture capital fundraising and that the larger, institutional investors were now working with the company “to figure out the plan.” 

What that plan might be — and what necessitated it in the first place — remains a mystery. In the month since The 74 first reported on the company’s downfall, key figures in AllHere’s rise have gone underground. The 74 sought comments from more than a dozen company officials, including its founder, investors at prominent venture capital firms and members of its board of directors. None, aside from Francisco, would speak publicly about the company. 

It’s a major shift for AllHere’s backers, many of whom work at impact investment firms that fund startups through a social justice lens. These figures were once outspoken about AllHere and their shared place in the race to inject AI into schools. Among those who have gone silent is Andrew Parker of the firm Spero Ventures, whose fundraising efforts landed him a seat on AllHere’s board of directors. In a 2021 blog post, he described AllHere’s AI-powered answer to chronic absenteeism, one of the pandemic’s most lasting impacts, as a profound innovation in the way schools communicate with parents. The company, he boasted, was a smart bet. 

“Being this primary conduit of communication is a terrific business opportunity, and it’s how AllHere will thrive in the years to come,” wrote Parker, who declined to comment for this story.

AllHere’s latest financial woes aren’t the first time that Smith-Griffin felt the pressure of a company mission gone wrong. Shortly after Boston-based AllHere emerged from a startup incubator at Harvard University, where Smith-Griffin was enrolled, its technological approach to bolster student attendance fell flat. 

“The first iteration of AllHere failed spectacularly,” Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, said in a 2017 interview on a Harvard Innovation Labs podcast. “And it was one of the best things that could have happened to us.” 

In response to those early startup woes, Smith-Griffin changed course. She ditched her initial idea of using data to create lists for teachers of the students most likely to become chronically absent — a service that educators told her wasn’t much help — and pivoted to an automated text messaging service that sent personally tailored “nudges” to parents in the guise of a friendly chatbot. 

The $6 million chatbot that it would eventually build for L.A. schools — an animated sun named “Ed” meant to interact individually with and accelerate the learning of some 540,000 students — was in a different class entirely. AllHere, according to a former employee-turned-whistleblower, put students’ personal information at risk by taking shortcuts to meet the school district’s ambitious demands.

Meanwhile, AllHere’s investors publicly touted that it was the infusion of cash and leadership from altruistically inclined impact firms that transformed the company from one with an under-baked product to an AI innovator in the K-12 space. An examination of these firms’ outsized role suggests that AllHere’s venture-influenced embrace of artificial intelligence may have led it to fail once again — this time on a much grander scale. 

‘Disturbed by the allegations’ 

Reached by phone, four members of the company’s board of directors — including several with extensive and well-known education policy credentials — declined to comment for this story. In fact, much of the information about AllHere’s unraveling has been filtered through an unusual channel: The school district it left in a lurch. 

It was an L.A. Unified district spokesperson who first told news outlets that Smith-Griffin was no longer with AllHere and that the company was up for sale. Smith-Griffin, who records show lives in North Carolina, couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Investigators with the district’s independent inspector general’s office have launched an inquiry into the former AllHere executive’s claims that the company misused L.A. students’ personal data and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho last week proposed a task force to find out what went wrong. The inquiry, Carvalho said, will dig into the district’s procurement process and claims the chatbot handled students’ personal information in ways that violated district policy and basic data privacy principles. 

“I’m disturbed by the allegations,” Carvalho said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times while speaking simultaneously on AllHere’s behalf. 

“We’ve had — our team has had — conversations with the company about those allegations,” Carvalho said. “The company has denied those allegations.” 

The task force, an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement, will create a framework for the district to “continue leveraging technology responsibly.” AllHere, which has been paid about $3 million so far, won the five-year contract after a competitive bidding process, the spokesperson said, and was selected “because it was most aligned” with the district’s vision for the chatbot and “was an established educational technology company focused on personalized and interactive AI solutions to improve student attendance.” 

‘A truly amazing board’

After the pandemic shuttered in-person learning nationally and student absences surged to unprecedented highs, Rethink Education, an ed tech-focused impact investment firm that provided early capital to AllHere, saw an opening. A case study by Impact Capital Managers says that Rethink provided the company with more than cash flow; it oversaw a “strategic transition,” specifically “a pivot towards an AI chatbot” that observers would later say was outside the scope of AllHere’s capabilities.

Rethink Education partner Ebony Brown offered AllHere critical connections to influential education players and helped it build “a truly amazing board” of directors, according to a 2021 blog post by Matt Greenfield, Rethink’s managing partner. She successfully recruited Jeff Livingston, a former senior vice president at McGraw-Hill Education and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation consultant, and Janice Jackson, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. 

“Ebony got introductions to several former superintendents of large districts, secured a meeting with Janice, and delivered an impassioned and ultimately successful pitch,” Greenfield wrote. The addition of Livingston and Jackson to the AllHere board was strategic, according to the case study, noting that they “have been instrumental in securing deals with major school districts and in developing a customer acquisition playbook to expand the company’s nationwide presence.” 

The extent to which board members’ helped AllHere land the LAUSD contract is unclear. Livingston and Jackson both declined to provide comment for this story. Greenfield and Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Brown, who also gained a seat on AllHere’s board, then sought to improve the company’s visibility, helping Smith-Griffin “secure a spot as the featured entrepreneur” on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for education leaders in 2021. A year later, Smith-Griffin served as a Forbes 30 Under 30 judge alongside Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at the investment company GSV Ventures. 

GSV is heavily involved in education technology companies. In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the district’s buzzed-about chatbot at the high-profile annual conference in San Diego co-hosted by the venture firm and Arizona State University.

“The Forbes profile,” Greenfield’s post notes, “in turn led to inbound interest from venture capitalists, multiple term sheets [documents outlining the terms under which VCs fund startups] and a round” of investments totaling more than $8 million. 

On June 12, just two days before AllHere announced that it had furloughed most of its staff, the company got bad news from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Officials rejected AllHere’s patent application for a chatbot that addressed student absenteeism, finding that the tool didn’t present eligible technological advancements. 

The office wrote: “No inventive concept exists sufficient to transform the abstract idea of ‘student monitoring’ into a patent-eligible application of that idea.” 

LAUSD last month shut down the chatbot after the firm hired to build it lost its CEO and furloughed workers. District officials said they would try to salvage the $6 million project.

Undeterred, the Los Angeles Unified school board a few days later on June 18 passed a resolution to build another AI-powered web portal, one where parents can access data on school budgets and student achievement.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

But educators and families said the district should focus on academics and social services before taking on any new tech projects — and address lingering issues around the botched rollout as well as ongoing concerns over data security.

Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice, a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families, said the district would do better to address a literacy crisis and epidemic of homeless students, rather than rush to adopt new technology.

“You have the administration rolling out the latest technology, but the parents that I’m working with have no clue what that’s all about,” said Aleman.

Many families don’t even have internet service to access the new AI-powered tools, Aleman said. “Parents are advocating for very fundamental issues like literacy, school safety, and mental health resources,” she said.

LA Unified in March distinguished itself by announcing the ambitious rollout of its new, AI-powered chatbot, an animated sun named “Ed,” becoming the first school district in the nation to deploy artificial intelligence technology at scale for families.

Superintendent Aberto Carvalho hailed the high-profile effort as a “game changer” that would allow families unprecedented access to student data and school information, and could eventually lead to the automated development of individualized lessons and aid instruction.

But just three months later, AllHere announced that its CEO had left and it had furloughed most of its workers due to financial problems. LAUSD immediately pulled the signature Ed chatbot offline, district officials said, because there was no AllHere staff available to supervise it.

LAUSD officials said the district had already paid the company about $3 million on a five-year, $6 million contract at the time of Ed’s shutdown. The district is trying to bring the pricey chatbot back to life, the officials said, but they would not say when it might be ready.

LAUSD’s inspector general’s office is investigating claims that AllHere violated data privacy rules.

Lester Garcia, an advisor for government relations at Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents teachers’ assistants and other LAUSD school staff, said school employees and union officials are concerned private data may have been compromised.

“I think there are a lot more questions than there are answers around why LAUSD fast-tracked this AI system to begin with,” Garcia said.

Dan Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School and candidate in LA Unified’s upcoming school board race this fall, said the Ed chatbot was never very useful for schools and students, even when it was up and running.

Chang, whose son attends another LAUSD middle school, said that the Ed chatbot mostly provided parents with generalized information that could be found elsewhere on the district’s web site.

“As a teacher, the use case for what it was initially scoped to do just seemed very marginal,” said Chang.

A better use of AI, Chang said, would be to harness the technology so teachers can use it.

Chang said AI could be used to analyze student assessment data, providing teachers with unprecedented insights into academic progress. The information could be used to inform lessons and be shared with parents at teacher conferences, he said.

But Chang said the spectacular failure of the Ed program could discourage schools from taking on such innovations. “It’s going to create a chilling effect for educators who want to try new technologies,” he said. “And these are things that could really help students.”

Despite problems with LAUSD’s adoption of AI technology for its Ed program, the district will continue to look for ways to use AI, LA Unified officials said.

LA Unified school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said the district is already working on an AI-powered budgeting tool that will track income and spending at schools and PTA organizations, and connect spending patterns to student outcomes.

Along with board member Nick Melvoin, Ortiz Franklin last month introduced and passed a resolution for the district to construct the AI-powered budgeting tool for use next year, and to make the budget information assembled by the tool publicly available on a district web page.

Ortiz Franklin said the district’s troubled partnership with AllHere on the Ed chatbot presents a learning opportunity for future AI projects. “We can apply lessons learned from our current interactions with AI vendors to ensure we’re making the best decisions for students,” she said.

University of Southern California education professor Stephen Aguilar, who studies schools’ use of AI at USC’s Center for Generative AI and Society, said that, despite the difficult rollout of Ed, Los Angeles – and other districts across the country – will eventually embrace AI.

“Districts are a little bit too quick to want to incorporate AI into the classroom without even knowing what it can do yet,” said Aguilar “There’s this rush to be innovative that comes with risks, and one of those risks is trying out untested technologies.”

The Improving Special Education Resolution, aimed at making services better for special needs children, was proposed by members of the Community Advisory Committee, a panel of about 20 parents, teachers, and community members. Members called for an increase in information available to parents and a wider range of services for students. 

When CAC members proposed the resolution a year ago, the district attempted to remove members advocating for special education, parents charge. Although the attempt did not succeed, parents said the move calls into question the district’s priorities and willingness to work with them.  

“I think that especially under superintendent (Alberto) Carvalho, they are cracking down on attempts to empower families to ask for what they want,” said Ariel Harman-Holmes, CAC chair and parent of a special needs child. “We used to have, as a committee, excellent open communication with…[the district]…now all we get is canned commentary where it’s clear they have a very small number of talking points.”

Carl Petersen, a father and CAC member said he has struggled to to get his daughters the help they need in LAUSD’s special education programs. 

Petersen’s wife visited their daughter’s classroom while preparing for a lawsuit against the school and was disturbed by what she found. 

“Basically, the teacher just put the special ed kids in the back and said, ‘Here, play,’ and taught the class without them. It’s not inclusion just because they were sitting in the same classroom.”

Members of the CAC charge that such challenges have been an ongoing issue and have only gotten worse after the proposed resolution. 

An LAUSD spokesperson declined to comment on the parents’ allegations, referring a reporter to the Office of ADA compliance and the district’s special education plan. 

The charges come just three years after a lawsuit was brought against LAUSD by parents for neglecting students with disabilities during online learning. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education found that over 66,000 students were affected.

LAUSD rolled out a compensatory plan the following year to provide students with extra services. However, parents are still dissatisfied, with many claiming services promised to their students had yet to be received.

Advocates say resources in the wake of these two events have been increasingly limited, even requiring parents to file Public Records Act requests for basic information, said Harman-Holmes.

Lisa Mosko, a former LAUSD parent, and founder of Speducational, an organization encouraging parents to speak up for their children, said that at a recent meeting she attended a student was denied access to a program she ultimately qualified for. 

After the parents pushed back and hired a lawyer, Mosko said, the child was admitted to the program. 

“There’s a lot of misinformation literally given at IEP’s (Individualized Education Program),” said Mosko. “That parent (had to) now go through due process for her child’s accessibility. It comes down to cost saving…because they know only a certain number of parents will go to due process.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

But for many families at 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy in Watts, a pair of clean pants and a shirt is such a struggle that it has become one of the main contributors to chronic absenteeism, which is when students miss 15 or more days or classes. 

“Children can be brutally honest sometimes,” said principal Jose Hernandez. “…When kids come with dirty or smelly clothes, the other kids will definitely point it out to them,” making them targets of bullying.

For years, Hernandez and his staff have been helping families work through this issue. Hernandez once helped a family without a working washer by providing clothing for their child. He has also given families money for their needs, including for laundry expenses. 

In May, the school was one 20 that received a new washing machine and dryer from the Rams NFL football team and the Think Watts Foundation; along with $2 million in clothing to schools serving low income students. Earlier this year, LAUSD also announced a mobile laundry service for homeless students as part of the district’s attempt to combat chronic absenteeism. 

Hernandez hopes the machines will ease the pressure on parents and make it easier for students to return to school. 

In an interview with LA School Report, Hernandez talked about his challenging upbringing and how it shapes his commitment to his students; and why small things, like a washing machine, can create a big impact.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

LA School Report: What’s your relationship with 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy? 

Jose Hernandez: I grew up very near Watts, just two miles from where I’m teaching now. Many of the children here are going through situations similar to what I experienced as a child. I grew up in a sometimes dysfunctional household. My father was an alcoholic, while my mom, bless her soul, always worked really hard to make sure we had a roof over our heads and proper clothing for school. My dad was in and out of the picture because of his alcoholism. However, when I was 13, he stopped drinking, got a stable job, and improved his ways, which helped me have a somewhat normal upbringing during my teenage years.

When I see my students coming to school, I see myself and my sisters in all of these kids. So when someone tells me, “Mr. Hernandez, this kid has a problem and will not learn,” they’re talking about me. I don’t want to hear that at 112, and I’ll be unapologetic about it. I’ll tell them, “Don’t ever say that one kid at my school cannot learn or cannot behave. The problem is with us. We need to fix it so that he can learn and behave.” Because if you’re talking about him, you’re talking about me. At 112, that’s my relationship with these kids. I say it again and again: At 112, we are here to serve.

Tell us about your school demographic.  

My school community’s demographics are approximately 69% Latino students and about 31% African American students. Over 95% of my students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The school is also fed by the Nickerson Gardens housing projects, the second-largest housing project west of the Mississippi River. Many of my kids live in the projects often for generations, and they come with a lot of baggage. They’ve seen things that many of us can only imagine and more.

At 112, we constantly battle chronic absenteeism and strive to foster empathy among our students, ensuring they support and are not mean to one another. This is a daily effort. We build their empathetic side at school, but they return to the community and hear other influences, making it an uphill battle, like fighting against the current.

Despite the challenges, we have wonderful families here who value education. They want their children to use education as a stepping stone to move to more affluent neighborhoods. Many see education as a means of moving out of the projects.

How does not having clean clothes contribute to chronic absenteeism?

Students and children can be brutally honest sometimes, and when kids come with dirty or smelly clothes, the other kids will definitely point it out to them. They’re not going to sugarcoat it. They’ll definitely just say, “Why do your clothes smell so bad?” or “Why are your clothes always dirty?” This definitely impacts students’ self-confidence, making it an environment where kids don’t want to be. Why would you want to be in a place where people make you feel bad about yourself? This is definitely a contributing factor to kids not wanting to be in school.

Especially as kids move up the grades, this becomes more significant. At our school, we have classes from Transitional Kindergarten all the way up to fifth grade. First graders when they are told they’re stinky or something like that, but they usually just blow it off and keep playing. But a fourth grader or a fifth grader who hears that they’re clothes are stinky or soiled is going to think twice about it. At that age, they hold what their peers say in very high regard.

Could you provide an example to help better understand the problem these families face?

I had a situation where a particular family in my community had no washer. I gave the kid clothing because I didn’t want him to be bullied or made to feel bad by his classmates. I talked to the mom, and she shared with me that her washer wasn’t running, so I offered to try to get it fixed for her.

I got a technician and paid him personally for it to get it fixed. 

The technician went into the house to check the unit, and later he called me and said, “Mr. Hernandez, I checked the unit, but to fix it, I need to order a specific part that costs over $350. However, I must be honest with you, even if I change that part, there’s no guarantee it will run for a long period because the unit is full of roaches. When I opened it up, there were a lot of roaches, and I don’t know if they were eating at the connections or what. I don’t want to take your money and provide a temporary fix because, two or three months from now, you’ll be in the same situation due to the roach problem.”

That’s very difficult to hear. It’s hard. So, we’ve been working with that particular family to try to schedule them to use our new washer and dryer when it is installed. In the meantime, we’ve working on getting her to a laundromat.  

How did the school handle these issues before the LA Rams and the Think Watts Foundation donated the washing machine set?

That’s a two-part answer. First, we try to ensure that the children have adequate clothing for school to build up their confidence. Second, we talk to the kids who are around them or who might be making them feel uncomfortable, encouraging them to be more empathetic towards their classmates to prevent them from hurting others’ feelings. Maybe they don’t mean to, but it’s important that they don’t continue to hurt these kids’ feelings.

We have some donated items here at the school, and we often make sure to change them out for the clothing they are wearing. They take both the clean clothes we’ve given them and their old clothes back home. Additionally, we reach out to the parents to find out the actual issue, such as why “little Jose” is coming to school in soiled clothing. We try to get to the root of the problem. Sometimes we hear stories like, “We don’t have a washer and dryer right now,” or “We’re not getting the check, so finances are tight and we don’t have money for the laundromat,” or “Someone is sick and can’t get out of bed or the wheelchair to go to the laundromat around the corner to clean the clothes.” Sometimes I’ll visit a family and donate $20 or $30 so they can get at least a few loads of laundry done and dried, alleviating the problem for that week. 

What is this going to look like when it opens? 

Access is going to be limited because we can’t have everybody come in and use it. With wear and tear, things will eventually break down. However, we will have a system in place. I’ve been discussing it with my team, though nothing is set in stone yet. It will be appointment-only and managed through our Parent Center, which serves as our community liaison center. 

An employee will oversee the process to ensure proper use of the machines. This oversight is crucial for maintaining their functionality. Access won’t be open to everyone; there needs to be a structured system. I will also incorporate teacher input since they know the students best and work closely with them daily.

Is it going to be free? 

Currently, it’s completely free. We have enough detergent for several months and are conducting a recycling program at the school site. The funds generated from recycling will be used to purchase more detergent and support the Wellness Center’s resources for the washer and dryer.

Luis’s mother said the boy stopped socializing after his fourth grade class at his Los Angeles Unified school in Southeast L.A. shut down. She asked that the family not be identified in order to protect her son. 

He began having behavioral issues. He fell way behind in his academics — all after not receiving his mandated services of behavior, speech, and occupational therapies or his one-on-one aid over Zoom. 

Now back in school, Luis needs two years of missed services to catch up, said his mother.

“He needs these services again as soon as possible,” said Luis’s mother.  “I have no other options.” 

Hopefully, Luis will soon get the services he needs. 

LAUSD agreed to provide these services to Luis and more than 66,000 district students with disabilities in a May resolution with the federal Office of Civil Rights after an investigation revealed students were not provided federally-mandated services during the pandemic.

The broadly-worded nine page agreement calls for the district to create a plan providing students the compensatory services, staff training and ongoing communication with parents on the plan’s status. 

Concerned about how the district’s Special Education Division will implement the services, disability rights lawyers, advocates and parents offered ideas on what LAUSD needs to provide to the students — including mental health services, more special education teachers, more staff training, better transportation to services and a bigger special education budget.

“I’m concerned [the resolution] is a way for the district to look compliant without fixing root issues,” said Jill Rowland, Education Program Director at the Alliance for Children’s Rights, which advocates for the rights of foster care youth in schools in California.  

“We need transportation support to get kids to the providers at centers outside of their schools,” she said. “We need translation services to help students and families who don’t speak fluent English. There’s also already such a shortage of staff, especially for students with disabilities.”

The agreement also calls for L.A. Unified to provide ‘compensatory services’ to students with disabilities, which means the district has acknowledged claims they denied a free and appropriate public education to some students during the pandemic. 

L.A. special education lawyer Chris Eisenberg said the resolution is another tool for lawyers, advocates, and parents to use in holding LAUSD accountable to provide students’ services. 

“I’m hoping that this admission from LAUSD will push them in a better direction,” said Eisenberg “With people breathing down their necks, now they will have to be held accountable to the students.” 

LAUSD’s severe teacher shortage is particularly acute among special education teachers. The number of students with disabilities in California has been increasing since 2015 and the special education teacher shortage has gotten worse each year. As of 2021, students with disabilities make up 13% of the district’s population.

Special education services are also one of the biggest costs for the district. In 2016, the cost to educate students with disabilities was over $8,000 more per student than that of a general education student. 

“The district has always been concerned with spending too much on special education,” said Valerie Vanaman, a special education attorney who has been critical of the district’s treatment of these students during the pandemic. 

Advocates and parents say they want more funds allocated to special education services from the influx of money that the district received for pandemic relief.

Luis’ mom, who said she’s been disappointed with the quality of the services provided to her son, wants aids, therapists, teachers, and tutors that understand her son’s particular issues.

“He deserves better services and a better life than what they’re offering,” said the mom. “I’ve lost faith in them.”

Lisa Barros Mosko, a parent who was director of Speak Up, an L.A. special education advocacy group when the nonprofit produced a survey showing many parents said their children weren’t getting services during the pandemic, said there had been an ongoing problem with services for years. 

“The pandemic really shed light on the inequities and lack of services for kids with disabilities in the district.”

Advocates and parents also said they were concerned about which officials from L.A. Unified will supervise the district’s work on the resolution. They are concerned that it will be the same leadership that denied their children services during the pandemic. 

“How can we trust the same people who neglected our children’s needs in the first place?” Mosko said. “I think we need completely new leadership in order to rebuild trust.”

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said in a statement the district has agreed to “critical components” such as staff training and ongoing outreach to special education parents and advocates. 

“L.A. Unified remains dedicated to helping all students, including students with disabilities, recover from the pandemic and achieve their educational goals,” the spokesperson said.

Investigators with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general’s office conducted a video interview with Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, after he told The 74 his former employer’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

Whiteley told The 74 he had alerted the school district, the IG’s office and state education officials earlier to the data privacy problems with Ed but got no response. His meeting with investigators occurred July 2, one day after The 74 published its story outlining Whiteley’s allegations, including that the chatbot put students’ personally identifiable information at risk of getting hacked by including it in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant; sharing it with other third-party companies unnecessarily and processing prompts on offshore servers in violation of district student privacy rules. 

In an interview with The 74 this week, Whiteley said the officials from the district’s inspector general’s office “were definitely interested in what I had to say,” as speculation swirls about the future of Ed, its ed tech creator AllHere and broader education investments in artificial intelligence. 

“It felt like they were after the truth,” Whiteley said, adding, “I’m certain that they were surprised about how bad [students’ personal information] was being handled.”

To generate responses to even mundane prompts, Whiteley said, the chatbot processed the personal information for all students in a household. If a mother with 10 children asked the chatbot a question about her youngest son’s class schedule, for example, the tool processed data about all of her children to generate a response. 

“It’s just sad and crazy,” he said.

The inspector general’s office directed The 74’s request for comment to a district spokesperson, who declined to comment or respond to questions involving the inquiry.

While the conversation centered primarily on technical aspects related to the company’s data security protocols, Whiteley said investigators probed him on his personal experiences with AllHere, which he described as being abusive, and its finances.

Whiteley was laid off from AllHere in April. Two months later, a notice posted to the company’s website said a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position” and the LAUSD spokesperson said company co-founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin had left. The former Boston teacher and Harvard graduate was successful in raising $12 million in venture capital for AllHere and appeared with L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at ed tech conferences and other events throughout the spring touting the heavily publicized AI tool they partnered to create.

Just weeks ago, Carvalho spoke publicly about how the project had put L.A. out in front as school districts and ed tech companies nationally race to follow the lead of generative artificial intelligence pioneers like ChatGPT. But the school chief’s superlative language around what Ed could do on an individualized basis with 540,000 students had some industry observers and AI experts speculating it was destined to fail.

The chatbot was supposed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replied “using simple language a third grader could understand” to help students and parents supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues. What they were given, Whiteley charges, was a student privacy nightmare. 

Smith-Griffin recently deactivated her LinkedIn page and has not surfaced since her company went into apparent free fall. Attempts to reach AllHere for comment were unsuccessful and parts of the company website have gone dark. LAUSD said earlier that AllHere is for sale and that several companies are interested in acquiring it.

The district has already paid AllHere $3 million to build the chatbot and “a fully-integrated portal” that gave students and parents access to information and resources in a single location, the district spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday, and “was surprised by the financial disruption to AllHere.” 

AllHere’s collapse represents a stunning fall from grace for a company that was named among the world’s top education technology companies by Time Magazine just months earlier. Scrutiny of AllHere intensified when Whiteley became a whistleblower. He said he turned to the press because his concerns, which he shared first with AllHere executives and the school district, had been ignored.

Whitely shared source code with The 74 which showed that students’ information had been processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, were sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

‘How are smaller districts going to do this?’

What district leaders failed to do as they heralded their new tool, Whiteley said, is conduct sufficient audits. As L.A. — and school systems nationwide — contract with a laundry list of tech vendors, he said it’s imperative that they understand how third-party companies use students’ information. 

“If the second-biggest district can’t audit their [personally identifiable information] on new or interesting products and can’t do security audits on external sources, how are smaller districts going to do this?” he asked.

Over the last several weeks, the district’s official position on Ed has appeared to shift. In late June when the district spokesperson said that several companies were “interested in acquiring Allhere,” they also said its predecessor would “continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.” In its initial response to Whiteley’s allegations published July 1, the spokesperson said that education officials would “take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

In a story two days later in the Los Angeles Times, a district spokesperson said the chatbot had been unplugged on June 14. The 74 asked the spokesperson to provide documentation showing the tool was disabled last month but didn’t get a response. 

Even after June 14, Carvalho continued to boast publicly about LAUSD’s foray into generative AI and what he described as its stringent data privacy requirements with third-party vendors. 

On Tuesday, the district spokesperson told The 74 that the online portal — even without a chatty, animated sun — “will continue regardless of the outcome with AllHere.” In fact, the project could become a source of district revenue. Under the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, which was obtained by The 74, the chatbot is the property of the school district, which was set to receive 2% in royalty payments from AllHere “should other school districts seek to use the tool to benefit their families and students.” 

In the statement Tuesday, the district spokesperson said that officials chose to “temporarily disable the chatbot” amid AllHere’s uncertainty and that it would “only be restored when the human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.” 

Whiteley agreed that the district could maintain the student information dashboard without the chatbot and, similarly, that another firm could buy what remains of AllHere. He was skeptical, however, that Ed the chatbot would live another day because “it’s broken”

“The name AllHere,” he said, “I think is dead.”

The AI bot, created by Boston-based AllHere Education, was launched March 20. But just three months later, AllHere posted on its website that a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin was no longer on the job. AllHere was up for sale, the district said, with several businesses interested in acquiring it.

The news was shocking and certainly bleak for the ed tech industry, but several observers say the partnership bit off more than it could chew, tech-wise — and that the ensuing blowup could hurt future AI investments.

Ed was touted as a powerful, easy-to-use online tool for students and parents to supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and help families navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues, all in 100 languages and on their mobile phones.

But Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of AI for Education, a consulting and training firm, said that was an overreach.

“What they were trying to do is really not possible with where the technology is today,” she said. ”It’s a very broad application [with] multiple users — teachers, students, leaders and family members — and it pulled in data from multiple systems.”

She noted that even a mega-corporation like McDonald’s had to trim its AI sails. The fast-food giant recently admitted that a small experiment using a chatbot to power drive-thru windows had resulted in a few fraught customer interactions, such as one in which a woman angrily tried to persuade the bot that she wanted a caramel ice cream as it added multiple stacks of butter to her order.

If McDonald’s, worth an estimated $178.6 billion, can’t get 100 drive-thrus to take lunch orders with generative AI, she said, the tech isn’t “where we need it to be.”

If anything, L.A. and AllHere did not seem worried about the project’s scale, even if industry insiders now say it was bound to under-deliver: Last spring, at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, Smith-Griffin and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho showed off Ed widely, with Carvalho saying it would revolutionize students’ and parents’ relationships to school, “utilizing the data-rich environment that we have for every kid.”

In an interview with The 74 at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego in April, Carvalho said many students are not connected to school, “therefore they’re lost.” Ed, he promised, would change that, with a “significantly different approach” to communication from the district.

“We are shifting from a system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one,’” with personalization and individualization for each student, he said, and “meaningful connections with parents.”

Better communication with parents, he said, would help improve not just attendance but reading and math proficiency, graduation rates and other outcomes. “The question that needs to be asked is: Why have those resources not meaningfully connected with students and parents, and why have they not resulted in this explosive experience in terms of educational opportunity?”

Carvalho noted Ed’s ability to understand and communicate in about 100 different languages. And, he crowed, it “never goes to sleep” so it can answer questions 24/7. He called it “an entity that learns and relearns all the time and does nothing more, nothing less than adapt itself to you. I think that’s a game changer.” 

But one experienced ed tech insider recalled hearing Carvalho speak about Ed at the conference in April and say it was already solving “all the problems” that big districts face. The insider, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely about sensitive matters, found the remarks troubling. “The messaging was so wrong that at that point I basically started a stopwatch on how long it would take” for the effort to fail. “And I’m kind of amazed it’s been this long before it all fell apart. I feel badly about it, I really do, but it’s not a surprise.”

‘A high-risk proposition’

In addition to the deal’s dissolution, The 74 reported last week that a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere told district officials, L.A.’s independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that Ed processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of the district’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of being hacked — warnings that he said the agencies ignored. 

AI for Education’s Bickerstaff said developers “have to take caution” when building these systems for schools, especially those like Ed that bring together such large sets of data under one application.

“These tools, we don’t know how they work directly,” she said. “We know they have bias. And we know they’re not reliable. We know they can be leaky. And so we have to be really careful, especially with kids that have protected data.”

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with the education consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners, said what often happens is that district leaders “try to go really big and move really fast to adopt a new technology,” not fully appreciating that it’s “a really high risk proposition.”

While ed tech is rife with disaster stories of overpromising and disappointing results, Spurrier said, other districts dare to take a different approach, starting small, iterating and scaling up. In those cases, he said, disaster rarely follows.

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), put it more bluntly: “Whenever a district says, ‘Our strategy around AI is to buy a tool,’ that’s a problem. When the district says, ‘For us, AI is a variety of tools and skills that we are working on together,’ that’s when I feel comfortable that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Culatta suggested that since generative AI is developing and changing so rapidly, districts should use the next few months as “a moment of exploration — it’s a moment to bring in teachers and parents and students to give feedback,” he said. “It is not the moment for ribbon cutting.” 

‘It’s about exploring’

Smith-Griffin founded AllHere in 2016 at Harvard University’s Innovation Labs. In an April interview with The 74, she said she originally envisioned it as a way to help school systems reduce chronic absenteeism through better communication with parents. Many interventions that schools rely on, such as phone calls, postcards and home visits, “tend to be heavily reliant on the sheer power of educators to solve system-wide issues,” she said.

A former middle-school math teacher, Smith-Griffin recalled, “I was one of those teachers who was doing phone calls, leaving voicemails, visiting my parents’ homes.” 

AllHere pioneered text messaging “nudges,” electronic versions of postcard reminders to families that, in one key study, improved attendance modestly. 

The company’s successful proposal for L.A., Smith-Griffin said, envisioned extending the attendance strategies while applying them to student learning “in the most disciplined way possible.”

“You nudge a parent around absences and they will tell you things ranging from, ‘My kid needs tutoring, my kid is struggling with math’ [to] ‘I struggle with reading,’” she said. AllHere went one step further, she said, bringing together “the full body of resources” that a school system can offer parents.

The district had high hopes for the chatbot, requiring it to focus on “eliminating opportunity gaps, promoting whole-child well-being, building stronger relationships with students and families, and providing accessible information,” according to the proposal.

In April, it was still in early implementation at 100 of the district’s lowest performing “priority” schools, serving about 55,000 students. LAUSD planned to roll out Ed for all families this fall. The district “unplugged” the chatbot on June 14, the Los Angeles Times reported last week, but a district spokesperson said L.A. “will continue making Ed available as a tool to its students and families and is closely monitoring the potential acquisition of AllHere.” The company did not immediately responded to queries about the chatbot or its future.

As for the apparent collapse of AllHere, speculation in the ed tech world is rampant.

In the podcast he co-hosts, education entrepreneur Ben Kornell said late last month, “My spidey sense basically goes to ‘Something’s not adding up here and there’s more to the story.’” He theorized a “critical failure point” that’s yet to emerge “because you don’t see things like this fall apart this quickly, this immediately” for such a small company, especially in the middle of a $6 million contract.

Kornell said the possibilities fall into just a few categories: an accounting or financial misstep, a breakdown among AllHere’s staff, board and funders or “major customer payment issues.” 

The district also may have withheld payment for undelivered products, but he said the sudden collapse of the company seemed unusual. “If you are headed towards a cash crisis, the normal thing to do would be: Go to your board, go to your funders, and get a bridge to get you through that period and land the plane.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said L.A. deserves a measure of credit “for being willing to lean into AI technology and think about ways that it could work.” But he wonders whether the best use of generative AI at this moment will be found not in “revolutionizing instruction,” as L.A. has pursued, but elsewhere. 

“There’s plenty of opportunities to think about how AI might help on the administrative side of things, or help folks that are kind of outside the classroom walls,” rather than focusing on changing how schools deliver instruction. “I think that’s the wrong place to start.”

ISTE’s Culatta noted that just down the road from Los Angeles, in Santa Ana, California, district officials there responded to the dawn of tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating evening classes for adults. “The parents come in and they talk about what AI is, how they should be thinking about it,” he said. “It’s about exploring. It’s about helping people build their skills.” 

‘How are your financials?’

The fate of AllHere’s attendance work in districts nationwide isn’t clear at the moment. In one large district, the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Public Schools, near Washington, D.C., teachers piloted AllHere with 32 schools as far back as January 2020, spokeswoman Meghan Thornton said. The district added two more schools to the pilot in 2022, but AllHere notified the district on June 18 that, effective immediately, it wouldn’t be able to continue its services due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.” 

District officials are now looking for another messaging system to replace AllHere “should it no longer be available,” Thornton said.

Bickerstaff said the field more broadly suffers from “a major, major overestimation of the capabilities of the technology to date.” L.A., she noted, is the nation’s second-largest school district, so even the pilot stage likely saw “very high” usage, raising its costs. She predicted a fast acquisition of AllHere, noting that they’d been looking for outside investment for several months.

As founder of the startup Magic School AI, which offers teachers tools to streamline their workload, Adeel Khan is no stranger to hustling for funding — and to competitors running out of money. But he said the news about AllHere and Ed was bad for the industry more broadly, leaving districts with questions about whether to partner with newer, untested companies.

“I see it as something that is certainly not great for the startup ecosystem,” he said.

Even before the news about AllHere broke last month, Khan attended ISTE’s big national conference in Denver last month, where he talked to school district officials about prospective partnerships. “More than one time I was asked directly, ‘How are your financials?’” he recalled. 

Usually technology directors ask about features and what a product can do for students, he said. But they’re beginning to realize that a failed product doesn’t just waste time and money. It damages reputations as well. “That is on the mind of buyers,” he said. 

When school districts invest in new tech, he said, they’re not just committing to funding it for months or even years, but also to training teachers and others, so they want responsible growth.

“There’s a lot of disruption to K-12 when a product goes out of business,” Khan said. “So people remember this. They remember, ‘Hey, we committed to this product. We discovered it at ISTE two years ago and we loved it. It was great — and it’s not here anymore. And we don’t want to go through that again.’ ”

Boston-based AllHere Education, founded in 2016 by Harvard grad and former teacher Joanna Smith-Griffin, figured heavily in LAUSD’s March 20 launch of Ed, an AI-powered online tool for students and parents designed to supplement classroom instruction and help families navigate. 

But on June 14, AllHere furloughed the majority of its employees due to its “current financial position,” according to a statement posted on its website. A statement from LAUSD sent to The 74 said AllHere now is up for sale.  

But even before the surprise announcement, AllHere was already having trouble fulfilling its contract with LAUSD, according to one former high-ranking company executive. 

The company was unable to push back against the district’s timeline, he said, and couldn’t produce a “proper product.”

An LAUSD spokesperson said the district is aware of Smith-Griffin’s departure and that “several educational technology companies are interested in acquiring AllHere.” 

“The educational technology field is a dynamic space where acquisitions are not uncommon,” the spokesperson said via email. “We will ensure that whichever entity acquires AllHere will continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.”

Smith-Griffin and AllHere did not respond to requests for comment. The former CEO has taken down her LinkedIn profile. Portions of the AllHere website have also disappeared, including the company’s “About Us” page. 

James Wiley, a vice president at the education market research firm ListEdTech, said turmoil at AllHere could be a red flag for LAUSD’s AI program if the district hasn’t taken steps to protect itself from changes at the company.   

“It could be a problem,” said Wiley. “It depends on how much of the program the district has been able to bring in-house, as opposed to leaving with the vendor.”

Wiley also expressed surprise that LAUSD contracted with a relatively small and untested firm such as AllHere for its Ed rollout, as opposed to enlisting a major AI company for the job, or a larger ed tech firm.   

“You have bigger players out there who could have done this thing,” said Wiley.

Outside of Los Angeles, the company has offered districts a text messaging system that allows schools to inform families about weather events and other announcements. 

According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts with companies, AllHere has already been paid more than $2 million by LAUSD. The company has had much smaller contracts with other districts, according to GovSpend, including a $49,390 payment from Brownsville Independent School District in Texas and a similar-sized payment from Broward County Public Schools in Florida. 

But AllHere’s star had been ascendant. 

With backing from the Harvard Innovation Lab, Smith-Griffin raised more than $12 million to start the new company. AllHere in April was named one of the world’s top ed tech companies by TIME. 

The LAUSD school board last June approved a competitively bid $6.2 million contract for AllHere to plan, design and develop the district’s new AI tool, Ed. The deal began with a two-year agreement ending in July 2025, with options for three subsequent one-year renewals.  

Smith-Griffin appeared with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho in April to discuss the project, which was described by the district’s leader as a game-changer for LAUSD that represented the first time a school district systematically leveraged AI. 

The former AllHere executive, who was recently laid off, said in an interview that the company’s work with LAUSD was far more involved than that of its other customer school districts. 

The small company was being asked to create a far more sophisticated tool than its prior text messaging system and bit off more than it could chew in its contract with the nation’s second-largest district. 

At the same time, he said, AllHere employees operated more as consultants than as a company building its own product and were unable to “to say no or to slow things down” with the district.

“So I think because of that, they were unable or unwilling to build a proper product,” he said. 

LA parents and students, we want to hear from you. Tell us about your experience using AllHere’s Ed:

With reporting and contributions from Mark Keierleber and Greg Toppo