Los Angeles Unified School District chatbot provider Allhere goes belly up after taking over $2 million for three months of poor performance while violating student data privacy

AllHere Education, the Ed AI chatbot service provider to the Los Angeles Unified School District, has gone out of business after taking over $2,229,000 for providing three months of poor service while violating student data privacy. Harvard-educated Joanna Smith-Griffin and most of the employees have been fired. The failure is yet another tech experimentation fiasco by the district, wasting millions in taxpayer money.

Previously, the LAUSD attempted to roll out tablets to all students in a failed $1.3 billion project to improve student performance. The school district continues to spend more per student K-12 than most other first-world countries, yet with poorer student outcomes on standardized tests. The Ed AI chatbot project was an attempt to use technology to improve student learning and communication between the student, family, and district by answering questions like “What grade does my child have in this class?” rather than reading a grade card. The chatbot had been deployed to over 8,000 schools across 34 states, but the company could not deliver a properly working product to the LAUSD.

Also, former senior director of software engineering Chris Whiteley had notified the district office, inspector general’s office, and state education officials that the data collected and processed by the Ed AI chatbot was at risk of violating LAUSD data privacy rules and being hacked because the data was being shared with multiple outside service providers, including Snowflake, a cloud storage company.

Unfortunately, Snowflake was recently hacked. This resulted in the data for thousands of LAUSD schoolchildren being placed on the dark web, which included addresses, demographics, disciplinary actions, financials, grades, names and family names, parent details, and performances. The LAUSD stated that although the district does use Snowflake, there was no connection between this incident and the use of Snowflake by AllHere.

Readers with children targeted by this project might wonder how motivated their children would have been if they received the $2.2 million directly as free meals, shoes, backpacks, or sports gear. Parents who want their children to succeed should realize that children in many countries with less technology do far better by simply focusing on the fundamentals, like quickly calculating math using an abacus (like this one on Amazon) with a lesson book (like this one on Amazon).