Kamar Samuels ignored parents' persistent pleas to remove the principal at a troubled Brooklyn public school where woke NY Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones "sacrificed" her daughter to promote social justice.
Page A2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 27 September 2026
Schools chancellor under contract probe promises accountability, ignores pleas to fire failing principal
As it ran on the front
On September 13, Chancellor Kamar Samuels stood in front of reporters and promised a full overhaul of the city's contract procurement system: sunlight, audits, a paper trail nobody could hide behind. He did not mention that he is, at this moment, the subject of an investigation into his own procurement violations. A reformer, unencumbered by his own record — that's not a contradiction, that's — well. It's a contradiction. Let's move on.
Then, on September 26, the actual mechanism surfaced. The Department of Education had received persistent pleas from parents at that same Brooklyn school to remove its failing principal. The DOE did not remove the principal. It did not need a union to fail that building. It needed an office that received the complaints and sat on them, which is a different job title than the one Hannah-Jones assigned blame to, and the same job title as the man who'd just finished a press conference about accountability. Convenient, that the accountability tour stopped exactly at the schoolhouse door.…
…(cont) So: an agency under investigation for how it hands out contracts is the same agency that would not act on parents asking it to remove one underperforming principal — not a contract, not a vendor, a person, in a building, that parents named repeatedly. If accountability only works upward, toward audits nobody outside city government reads, and rarely downward, toward the one personnel decision that would have actually changed a child's day, then the word doesn't mean what the press conference said it meant. It means whichever direction protects the office that used it. Brooklyn parents calling about a principal were not that direction. That's the talking point. I said it.
“The guy in charge of city contracts is under investigation for how he hands out city contracts, and his big fix is a press conference. Same week, parents at a Brooklyn school are asking the Department of Education to remove a principal who's failing their kids, and nobody upstairs answers. Accountability's real in this town, it's just pointed straight up, rarely down at the building where your kid actually sits.”
“An investigation isn't a conviction — the chancellor cleaning up procurement while he's the one being investigated for procurement, that's actually reassuring, that's a guy who knows exactly where the problems are. And the principal thing, look, personnel moves take time, there's a process, due process — okay, the process took long enough that parents gave up counting the meetings, but that's a staffing issue, not a chancellor issue. That's — hm.”
The receipts
Nikole Hannah-Jones blames racism for NYC school failures, ignoring the role of the teachers' union and promoted officials like Kamar Samuels.
Teachers spent an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies last school year AdoptAClassroom.org 2025 Teacher Spending Survey
Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores who failed her daughter — the teachers unionNikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a failing public school despite being a multimillionaire to make a point: That she’s not a hypocrite who sends her children to private school like other school-choice opponents.
· NYC Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels promises ‘accountability’ in DOE contracts — while under probe himself for shady deals from the morgue, 13 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.