Kamar Samuels #

Introduction #

Kamar Samuels is the Schools Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, appointed under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became the city’s schools chief in January 2026 after running Manhattan’s District 3 as superintendent . He is now under investigation by the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation for his handling of a $180,000 no-bid contract he signed while serving as District 3 superintendent — a deal that was split into multiple payments to bypass the city’s competitive bidding process, according to reporting cited by Spectrum News NY1 . On September 12, 2026, the New York Post reported that Samuels stood alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Mamdani to promise a sweeping overhaul of DOE procurement and “accountability” — without mentioning that he remains under investigation over alleged procurement violations of his own .

Background Information #

Before his promotion to chancellor, Samuels led Community School District 3, which spans the Upper West Side and Harlem. In 2023, while superintendent, he approved a $180,000 contract with Language Learning Network, a company run by CEO Sean Kreyling that supplies long-term foreign-language teachers to schools . The vendor had not been approved by the Department of Education, and the contract’s value was divided into multiple payments small enough to dodge the thresholds that trigger city contracting oversight, per the New York Post and the Times reporting it cites . The arrangement surfaced only after a whistleblower’s complaint about a different problem: a banned teacher the vendor had placed in two District 3 schools .

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

Allegations. The claims in this section are allegations from New York Post reporting and the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation, which confirmed in June 2026 that it is investigating Samuels. They were never admitted by Samuels, never criminally charged, and never adjudicated in court. Samuels denies any improper intent and says the actions were lapses in policy and procedure undertaken “in the pursuit of educational opportunity,” not personal gain.

In September 2024, Language Learning Network placed an instructor named Ralph F. Franco — then going by “Rafael” — at two Manhattan schools sharing a building on West 93rd Street, according to a 2025 SCI report cited by the Post. A decade earlier, a separate SCI report had substantiated allegations that Franco made a sexual comment to a 15-year-old male student and touched him; Franco denied the allegations, and he had retired in 2015 under a settlement barring future DOE work unless human resources signed off . The whistleblower tip about Franco’s placement set the contract probe in motion. The 2025 SCI report found that Samuels’ then-deputy superintendent, Mariela Graham, had signed a neatly identical deal with Kreyling the following year and arranged to split payments between two of his companies to evade financial oversight, and recommended she be fired; a subsequent Post investigation reported that Samuels had signed a similar arrangement with Kreyling a year before Graham, and that emails showed he knew about the check-splitting . The SCI, led by Commissioner Anastasia Coleman, confirmed in June 2026 that Samuels himself was under investigation . Adding to the uproar, rather than firing Graham, Samuels promoted her to the DOE’s senior executive director of strategy, a $225,571-a-year post .

Public Reaction and Consequences #

Mayor Mamdani stood by his chancellor as the probe became public, saying in June 2026, “I can continue to be confident in his leadership,” while adding that he takes “any SCI investigation seriously and will be sure to await the findings” . City Council Speaker Julie Menin slammed the DOE under Samuels in a July letter for a “pattern of opacity, slow-walking and delay” in producing hundreds of contracts totaling some $13 billion for council review; a spokesperson later said City Hall delivered the contracts and they are being analyzed . After the September reform announcement, critics called the transparency pledge rank hypocrisy. “Chancellor Samuels announcing procurement reform is akin to Jack the Ripper announcing a public safety initiative,” a City Hall insider told the Post, while a DOE insider said it was “a bit much coming from someone who personally threw his deputy under the bus, destroyed her reputation and career, and walked away with an unblemished record” . Not everyone placed the blame on Samuels personally: Class Size Matters founder Leonie Haimson called the no-bid contract issue “a longstanding problem at the DOE and the chancellor should not take the entire burden and blame for it” .

Current Status #

Samuels remains schools chancellor, and the SCI investigation of him remains open with no reported findings and no criminal charges. Testifying before the City Council in June 2026, he said, “I regret the lapses in policy and procedures that took place while I was the superintendent, and the actions in question were all meant to [be] in the pursuit of educational opportunity,” and in a statement to NY1 he said the actions “were undertaken in pursuit of educational opportunities for children — not for personal gain” . On September 12, 2026, he appeared with Hochul and Mamdani at a Washington Heights press conference to pledge procurement reforms the administration says will save taxpayers more than $100 million across this fiscal year and next; he declined, via the DOE, to comment on the hypocrisy criticisms . A December 2025 SCI report separately found that check-splitting and other improper procurement practices had driven DOE spending on outside vendors up to $386 million in 2025, noting such violations “often resulted in financial losses to the DOE” and had led to state and federal prosecutions in other cases .

Impact on Their Career/Life #

The probe has turned Samuels’ signature issue — cleaning up DOE contracting — into a liability, with the Post now describing him as “scandal-plagued” and framing his reform pledge as undermined by his own conduct as superintendent . The Graham promotion has become a durable flashpoint: critics accuse him of benefiting from an investigation that ended his deputy’s DOE career while leaving his own record intact, a dynamic the Post’s sources referenced in blistering terms . His standing now depends heavily on the SCI’s as-yet-unreleased findings — Mamdani’s public support is explicitly conditioned on awaiting them . Until the investigation concludes, Samuels continues to lead the nation’s largest school system while simultaneously serving as the face of the procurement failures he has promised to fix.