Los Angeles schools chief placed on leave following FBI raid

The Los Angeles Unified School District placed its superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, on paid administrative leave Friday, two days after the FBI raided his home and his office, throwing the nation’s second-largest school district into turmoil.

The board of education announced the decision without further comment after back-to-back emergency closed sessions this week. The superintendent has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but concern has mounted in recent days for the stability of the district and the roughly 400,000 students it serves.

Carvalho’s interim replacement will be Andres Chait, a district veteran who has served as chief of school operations. The vote was unanimous.

The specific target of the investigation is not clear, but several people familiar with the inquiry said it appears to stem from a 2-year-old criminal probe into a troubled tech startup, AllHere. The company was awarded a $6 million contract to develop an artificial intelligence chatbot for Los Angeles schools before it collapsed amid fraud charges.

The FBI on Wednesday also searched the Florida home of Debra Kerr, a consultant for AllHere who worked on linking education technology vendors to school districts. She has been a friend and associate of Carvalho since his time leading the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where he served for more than 13 years.

AllHere’s CEO was criminally charged, but the case has remained unresolved as lawyers on both sides have postponed a trial “to discuss a potential disposition,” according to court records.

District officials, who requested anonymity to speak freely about legal matters, said that it appeared the AllHere inquiry had been expanded to include Carvalho’s dealings with Kerr not only in that case, but also during his tenure in Miami.

Carvalho, who has led the Los Angeles district since 2022, has not responded to requests for comment. Federal agents seized his work phone and other devices during the raid, according to one of the district officials.

The district said in a statement earlier this week that it was cooperating with authorities.

Carvalho has had a national reputation in education circles as charismatic and tech-friendly but also prone to occasional high-profile missteps.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he embraced tech-based remote and hybrid learning. In interviews with the media, he spoke of requiring Miami teachers to conduct live lessons over video and of encouraging parents to get involved with their children’s learning from home.

Carvalho has also been outspoken about the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration, defending the rights of immigrant students and discussing his own time as an impoverished immigrant without legal status from Portugal. Since then, he became a citizen, he said.

His career also has had moments of scandal. In 2008, leaked emails suggested that he had an inappropriate relationship with a reporter covering Miami schools. Carvalho said that he did not have an affair with the reporter, but that the emails he wrote were inappropriate, according to the Miami Herald.

In 2018, he accepted what some consider to be the most prestigious position in public education – leader of the New York City school system. He then abruptly backed out of the job on live television.

Within a year after he was hired in Los Angeles, he began clashing with the prior superintendent, Austin Beutner, dismantling popular academic programs that Beutner had championed. Last year, Beutner and a group of Los Angeles Unified students filed a lawsuit accusing the district and Carvalho of misusing more than $76 million in art and music education funds.

In 2024, Carvalho introduced a chatbot developed by AllHere in glowing terms from the stage at a tech conference. The chatbot, called Ed, was supposed to “democratize education,” Carvalho said.

Several months later, the technology failed and AllHere went bankrupt.

The Los Angeles district contracted with AllHere not long after Carvalho’s arrival and the project was largely his idea, officials have said. He billed it as a way for parents to stay in touch and on top of their children’s schoolwork, and for students to chat with a supportive, friend-like companion. The company, however, had little experience with state-of-the-art AI, or with large-scale projects like the one it was set to undertake in Los Angeles.

Its founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, is facing federal fraud charges for inflating AllHere’s revenues and customer base.

When it became clear that AllHere was under legal scrutiny, Los Angeles Unified hired an outside law firm to conduct an internal review of Carvalho’s dealings with the company, according to the district official who spoke anonymously. No criminal wrongdoing was found on his part.

The federal case has raised questions not just about financial decisions within the school system, but also about the wisdom of schools rushing to embrace technologies, including AI. Student achievement has declined nationally as screen time increased and schools have embraced the use of computers and other devices.

United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, has long raised concerns about what it sees as excessive spending on technology. The union is currently in contract negotiations with the district and has authorized a strike if the parties do not reach a deal.

In a statement this week, the union called on the district to provide “full transparency” into the Carvalho investigation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.