Alberto Carvalho: Silicon Valley's Useful Idiot — LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho: Ed-Tech Puppet

In the first minutes after news broke on Feb. 25th of an FBI raid on the home and office of Alberto Carvalho, the debonair superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), speculation was rampant in an information vacuum. On a local “Parents Supporting Teachers” Facebook group, many members assumed nefarious partisan prosecution by the Trump administration. (Carvalho, a Portuguese immigrant, has been vocal in his opposition to the vicious ICE raids across LA.) But to Angelenos who’d been paying closer attention, there was immediate suspicion that the legal drama would be somehow connected to Carvalho’s all-too-cozy relationship with big ed-tech — which has long been a source of worry for educators and parents alike.

Carvalho has not been charged with wrongdoing as of this writing, but evidence suggests the US Justice Department’s investigation involves a deal Carvalho cut with the now-bankrupt AI firm AllHere to launch “Ed,” a chatbot project now ranking among LAUSD’s most disastrous failures. However AllHere is but only one of Carvalho’s many entanglements and misadventures with the world of big tech. Whatever the outcome of the Allhere investigation, taken together, Carvalho’s Pollyanna boosterism of ed-tech raises serious questions about his judgment, technical competence, and suitability for any role dedicated to ensuring coherent pedagogy.

The Big Tech Toady

A self-styled reformer and “education innovator,” Carvalho has long demonstrated a fast-and-loose approach to shoe-horning ed-tech into the districts he commands. In Florida’s Miami-Dade public schools, where he was superintendent from 2008 to 2021, Carvalho spearheaded multiple mass “digital convergence” initiatives within America’s fourth-largest school district. This included replacing all 11,000 classrooms’ analog whiteboards with laggy, high-maintenance “Promethean” screens, a $63 Million 1:1 device program for every student in 2013, and launching a “Bring Your Own Device” e-commerce store for parents to buy subsidized tablets and laptops. Carvalho also mandated a rapid phase-out of all paper textbooks, declaring, “the convergence from a traditional textbook to digital content is a must.”

Whatever the outcome of the Allhere investigation, taken together, Carvalho’s Pollyanna boosterism of ed-tech raises serious questions about his judgment, technical competence, and suitability for any role dedicated to ensuring coherent pedagogy.

In his most high-profile Florida stumble, Carvalho bypassed school board approval in 2020 to award a no-bid, $15 million contract to K12 Inc. (now Stride Learning) for the internet learning platform “MySchoolOnline.” That product’s rollout was a technical disaster plagued by capacity, usability, and security failures, and Miami-Dade scrapped Carvalho’s chosen vendor in a unanimous vote mere days after its failed launch. More damningly, Carvalho was also formally rebuked by the Miami-Dade Inspector General for his unseemly solicitation of a $1.57 million donation from K12 to his own nonprofit foundation.

K12 scandal notwithstanding, Carvalho’s Miami-Dade tech push paid big career dividends for him (until now). He received five “Superintendent of the Year” plaudits through 2019, and was invited to the Obama White House at least three times as a “digital transformation” leader.

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Carvalho has also been a mainstay at ed-tech’s premiere power-schmoozefest: the Global Silicon Valley Summit (GSV). Dubbing itself “The World’s Largest EdTech Community” and often called “the Davos of Education,” GSV is really an exclusive, high-pressure trade show wrapped in a cloak of humanist righteousness, where billionaire venture capitalists and ed-tech sales execs press the flesh with school superintendents in conference panels and San Diego steakhouses. Carvalho has made at least seven high-profile appearances as a GSV panelist or keynote speaker since 2017.

In late 2021, Carvalho was recruited to lead LAUSD with a base annual salary of $440,000. Since moving to Hollywood, the superintendent has embraced tinsel town living with zeal. Whether it’s mugging with Snoop Dogg or staging a glitzy skyscraper rooftop concert, Carvalho is always camera-ready in his hair-sprayed coif and shiny, immaculately-tailored suits — shadowed by district photographers capturing a stream of brochure-worthy visuals for his social media accounts.

Shortly after Carvalho took office, a major ransomware attack on LAUSD’s computer network prompted the School Board to grant him emergency carte-blanche procurement authority for cybersecurity and tech infrastructure. Carvalho promptly proceeded to repeat his Miami-Dade playbook, signing a rash of no-bid tech contracts without Board approval.

Since then, LAUSD has been captured by Carvalho’s personal tech-forward orthodoxy. He has made 1:1 devices a reality for 545,000 students, plunging LA classrooms into Chromebook chaos. He has condemned kids as young as kindergarten to constant digital testing and numbingly repetitive e-lessons via a $20 million contract with the widely-despised i-Ready platform. His “iDream” program promotes so-called “e-sports” for playing video games like Minecraft during school hours, and the district AI task force he assembled included reps from Google Edu, The International Society for Technology in Education, and AI Edu Project—all AI trade boosters bankrolled by Silicon Valley behemoths including Alphabet, OpenAI, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

Tech-Crazy, Not Tech-Savvy

But however heartfelt Carvalho’s embrace of tech religion may be, it is also tinged with equal parts naïvety, tech-ignorance, and caustic impatience with anyone who doesn’t share his fevered devotion to the woefully unfulfilled promise of digital education.

In Carvalho’s now-infamous 2024 Global Silicon Valley announcement of the doomed “Ed” AI chatbot, a preceding slickly-produced video includes a dystopian montage of school children staring at screens, over which a Riefenstahlesque narration track has Carvalho bellowing messianically, “That is my dream; we will have absolute personalization and individualization!”

But at 61, like so many ambitious men of a certain age who are star-struck by the power and glamour of Silicon Valley technology — Carvalho often struggles to conceal that he doesn’t really understand it very well. Indeed, perhaps one factor in the implosion of LAUSD’s “Ed” chatbot project was Carvalho’s insistence that it possess an almost god-like omniscience that is still (for now, anyway) well beyond any LLM’s ability. In describing Ed’s promised features at Global Silicon Valley 2024, Carvalho reeled off a laundry list so cartoonishly absurd, his utter gullibility to pie-in-the-sky tech pitches snaps into clear focus:

The Equity Dodge

Another tactic Carvalho often employs to make his digital advocacy seem unassailable is to pepper it with cynical invocations of “equity.” The anachronistic implication is that in 2026, poor and minority students supposedly remain totally cut off from access to technology. But in our present era of cheap and inescapably ubiquitous gadgets, the actual biggest inequity most enjoyed by the wealthy is the luxury to send their kids to Waldorf and other analog schools, where they’re spared the cognitive harms caused by the very screen-based ed-slop that so bewitches Carvalho.

Ironically, just months before the spectacular implosion of the “Ed” chatbot — which never actually worked — Carvalho crowed obtusely that in the interest of “equity,” he was piloting the vaporware exclusively to 55,000 LAUSD students at “black and brown schools” with “the highest levels of poverty,” declaring “that’s where the need is greatest.” Unsurprisingly, he’s since been quiet about any and all Ed-influenced outcomes at those schools.

The Panacea Peddler

But however inescapable Carvalho has made gadgets in his districts’ classrooms, forcing students to stare at screens for hours every day, he actually laments that kids aren’t using them anywhere near enough. On multiple occasions, the superintendent has declared that “the silver lining” of the COVID pandemic was the warp-speed proliferation of 1:1 devices for students, enthusing that “every kid is connected, every kid is empowered with a device!” But he then proceeds to call it “shameful” that “every kid is using that device and connectivity at less than 10% of its potential use.” Evidently Carvalho would prefer to see LAUSD kids’ use of screens increase by another 900%.

A Prickly Proselytizer

Indeed, Carvalho’s faith in ed-tech is so intense, it sometimes borders on zealotry — replete with impolitic outbursts.

At a GSV panel titled “K12 Leaders’ Guide to Embracing a Generative AI World”, hosted by prominent ed-tech Venture Capitalist Marc Sternberg, Carvalho became downright testy about the public’s resistance to his brand of rapid techno-change. Scoffing at the fickle ignorance of the great unwashed, he huffed, “two thirds of Americans don’t believe that we actually had people who landed on the moon!” He then launched into a sarcastic diatribe, ranting, “We certainly cannot be intimidated by those who say, ‘Oh my god, artificial intelligence is gonna be terrible!’ Yeah, just like the printing press, the television and the Internet… Don’t like artificial intelligence? Stop ordering Uber Eats, do not use Waze, do not call Uber, do not watch Netflix! Because the reason why you are hooked on Bridgerton is because Netflix knew exactly what you love!”

As sycophantic pandering to an audience of ed-tech executives, the outburst was bizarre. Carvalho’s argument was simplistic, irrelevant to learning, and conveniently sidestepped the reality that any educator advocating artificial intelligence in their schools is like a Michelin-starred chef putting Oscar Mayer Lunchables on the menu.

During a September 2025 LAUSD School Board meeting, Carvalho sat stone-faced, refusing to make eye contact as a succession of strenuously polite parents shared their concerns over the harms of device-based learning. Afterwards, Carvalho revealed himself to be alarmingly uninformed about even basic differences between common gadgets. Comparing web-connected Chromebooks to airplane seatback televisions, he asked in dismissive exasperation, “What’s really the difference between that TV screen and a computer?” It was perhaps the most tech-ignorant remark by a public official since the late US Senator Ted Stevens called the Internet “a series of tubes.”

Carvalho’s argument was simplistic, irrelevant to learning, and conveniently sidestepped the reality that any educator advocating artificial intelligence in their schools is like a Michelin-starred chef putting Oscar Mayer Lunchables on the menu.

Defending ed-tech screens in classrooms, the superintendent also boasted of his district, “We are able to track — very accurately… our students’ usage”. He then invoked data revealing a daily average of seven to eight hours of at-home screen time on district-issued hardware. Carvalho expressed no remorse for disrupting families’ lives with the addictive devices, or for the district’s egregious violation of children’s privacy by tracking them in their own homes.

Instead, the superintendent flatly denied any possibility that excessive screen time in schools is a problem. Blaming parents who “substitute the iPad for meaningful conversations at dinner,” Carvalho asked, “do we have a problem specific to digital tool addiction in America?” Conceding, “yes we do,” he then snapped, “Schools are not the reason. Not even close!”

An Ed-Tech Failure

While Carvalho frequently touts a “breakthrough” in academic performance, the reality remains sobering. Under his leadership, LAUSD has celebrated a return to pre-pandemic test scores as if it were a moon landing, yet as of the 2024-2025 school year, fewer than 47% of the district’s students met grade-level standards in English, and a staggering 63% failed to meet the basic standard in math. Despite the millions funneled into Carvalho’s “personalized” AI interfaces and digital platforms, nearly one in three students remains chronically absent—a figure that has doubled since 2019.

Carvalho is not a dumb or heartless man. He has accomplished admittedly big things in his career, and demonstrated admirable human decency towards his districts’ students and families in many ways. But when it comes to ed-tech, he is a foolishly obstinate man, who sticks his head in the sand by rejecting the overwhelming evidence that not only has screen-based learning already proven pedagogically catastrophic to American academic achievement, but that screens are literally harmful to the developing prepubescent brain. To deny or refuse to even acknowledge such serious matters of academic and scientific research and debate is by definition anti-intellectual—making him fundamentally unfit for the office he holds (held?).

Unfortunately, Alberto Carvalho is hardly unique among American public school superintendents, legions of whom have been utterly hoodwinked by the ed-tech industry’s empty promises. But by sheer virtue of his visibility and influence as the leader of America’s second-largest school system, Superintendent Carvalho is the embodiment of their collective starry-eyed abdication to Silicon Valley — a charismatic, telegenic front man for the digital snake oil trade, and an education establishment chronically susceptible to fads and groupthink.

Whatever the outcome of Carvalho’s “Ed” A.I. boondoggle, his case must serve as a desperately needed wake-up call to the perverse unchecked romance between superintendents, school boards, and big ed-tech. Then perhaps before another superintendent trades chalkboards for chatbots, communities will demand legitimate proof of effectiveness in advance. Silicon Valley bros can afford to spout platitudes like “move fast and break things” and “fail fast and fail often” — but thanks to their obsequious fanboys like Carvalho, it’s our kids who are broken and failing.

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Alberto Carvalho: Silicon Valley’s Useful…