Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho came to Los Angeles with much fanfare in 2022, hailed as a national education leader who could help pull city schools out of a COVID funk and raise student achievement.
On Wednesday, the FBI served search warrants at Carvalho’s San Pedro home and at LAUSD headquarters.
No information was available about the target of investigation. Carvalho has not offered any comment so far.
But the morning activities rocked the school district.
Here is what we know about Carvalho from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.
A national leader in Miami-Dade
In Florida, he led Miami-Dade County Public Schools from 2008 to 2021. Carvalho is credited in the Miami-Dade district with providing stable leadership and improved academic performance and creating special programs that offer more schooling choices for parents.
Carvalho took a public stance rebuking Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on a mask mandate in schools. DeSantis prohibited districts from enacting a mandate in schools and allowed parents to choose whether to send their children in masks. Carvalho, citing guidance from medical leaders, defied the governor’s order and issued a mask mandate for students.
In Los Angeles, he immediately confronted a school district in which many students had long struggled to achieve and were further set back, academically and emotionally, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read more:
Arriving in L.A. at crucial moment
He took over the nation’s second-largest school district at a pivotal time as it struggled to recover from the pandemic, which closed schools.
A big social media user, he made early posts about L.A. lifestyle experiences — riding a horse past the Hollywood sign and skydiving while signing “I heart LAUSD” — prompting more eye-rolls than high-fives. These days his social media posts are all business.
He’s also aggressively pushing to improve attendance, after surging chronic absenteeism, and dealing with other issues ranging from labor to crime on campuses.
After years of post-pandemic academic help, Los Angeles students achieved a “new high watermark,” as math and English scores rose last year across all tested grades for the second straight year, surpassing results from before the 2020 campus closures, Carvalho announced in July. The gains are generally considered solid evidence that instruction is moving in the right direction.
Standing up for immigrants
He garnered national attention for his activism against the immigration raids that affected students last summer. He efforts garnered praise across the city and, he emerged as a foe of the Trump administration crackdown.
Carvalho — who was a teenage immigrant from Portugal — has said he would put his job at stake if necessary to protect and defend immigrant families, saying that standing by them is being “on the right side of history.”
Last year, the LAUSD Board of Education unanimous backed him for another four-year contract. Backers cited his efforts to improve academic achievement.
Last week, the Justice Department said it was seeking to join a federal lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles school district of discriminating against white students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in January by 1776 Project Foundation, targets a decades-old effort to combat the harms of segregation without requiring families to attend integrated schools.
Challenges with AI
Carvalho backed an artificial-intelligence chatbot for LAUSD students, families and teachers that quietly was disconnected three months after its release in 2024. It was supposed to respond to questions from students and parents in an accurate, helpful and private manner. Carvalho touted “Ed” as an AI-enhanced student advisor that was to be a component of a unique Individual Acceleration Plan, or IAP, for every student.
But it immediate faced challenges.
In 2024, federal prosecutors accused the head of the firm that provided the AI tool, Joanna Smith-Griffin, of defrauding investors and charged her with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Smith-Griffin, 33, is the founder and former chief executive of AllHere, the Boston-based company that created Ed.
The indictment and collapse of AllHere was an embarrassment for Carvalho and the school system but did not appear to represent a major financial exposure. The school system had spent about $300,000 with the company. By way of comparison, the district’s budget this year is $18.8 billion.
According to the indictment, from about November 2020 to around June 2024, Smith-Griffin misrepresented AllHere’s revenue, customer base and cash to investors.
In the spring of 2021, she allegedly told potential investors that AllHere generated about $3.7 million in revenue in 2020, had around $2.5 million in cash on hand and had major school district customers such as the New York City Department of Education and Atlanta Public Schools.
In reality, AllHere had generated about $11,000 in revenue in 2020, had about $494,000 in cash and did not have contracts with many of the customers it claimed, including the New York and Atlanta school systems, the indictment stated.
These misrepresentations allegedly continued through AllHere’s collapse; as the company was sinking, Smith-Griffin was able to obtain nearly $10 million from investors and sought an additional $35 million from a private equity investor, who ultimately decided to not invest.
At the time Carvalho addressed the allegations: “The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country. We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”
