Last week was extremely eventful, with news regarding DOE contracts, AI, and class size, so buckle in. If only one of these issues interest you, feel free to skip to that section; but all are important.
Spending on Contracts
Education budget hearings were held on Monday, and a major focus was DOE’s problematic contracting process. Speaker Menin began by asking the Chancellor why they had not received any of the 600 contracts they’d requested back in March. The DOE chief procurement officer Elisheba Lewi responded that this would “take months” because the contracts exist on “a secure system that very few people have access to.”
What? Contracts are public documents and shouldn’t be hidden in vaults as though they are top-secret information. While it can take months and sometimes years for me to access DOE contracts through Freedom of Information requests, I was gobsmacked that DOE stonewalled the City Council in this way.
The Speaker and the Ed Chair Eric Dinowitz then questioned the Chancellor about the contract he’d signed back in 2023 when he was District 3 Superintendent for $180,000 with a company that supplied temporary foreign-language teachers to schools. This contract apparently had been artificially divided into $25,000 increments to evade the DOE centralized contracting process.
This finding was first reported by Sue Edelman on her Substack, who took a look at a Special Commissioner of Investigator’s report from June 2025 that castigated the District 3 Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham for doing the very same thing in 2024. This report recommended that Graham be fired—without the SCI noticing Samuels had done the very same thing as Superintendent the year before.
Instead of being fired, Graham was promoted to DOE’s senior executive director of strategy. When questioned about this at the hearing, Chancellor Samuels responded that whatever he did was to benefit students. After he was repeatedly pressed, Liz Vladeck, the DOE’s General Counsel, advised him not to answer any more questions, since this issue is likely now being investigated by the SCI. Vladeck also admitted that she had approved of Graham’s promotion, despite the recommendation that she be fired.
Though many media outlets have picked up on this story, including most recently the NY Times, most have failed to explain that dividing up contracts to evade the centralized DOE contracting process that supposedly requires competitive bidding (though often does not) and a more careful privacy vetting process, (which is still inadequate) this parceling out bigger contracts to $25,000 amounts is a widespread and long-standing practice at DOE. As Chair Dinowitz pointed out, $386 million in contracts were divided into $25,000 increments in 2024. In my view, the Chancellor should not be uniquely targeted in this way, but instead the entire contracting process at DOE needs radical reform, as it has led to many millions wasted on ineffective or even damaging ed tech products as well as breaches and other privacy violations.
NYC Council’s Push for an AI Moratorium
The day following the hearing on Tuesday our AI Moratorium Coalition held a rally in City Hall Park, to release a NYC Council letter to the Mayor and Chancellor, urging them to enact the call for a two year moratorium on the use of AI in the classroom. What’s impressive about this letter is that it was signed by 29 Council Members – more than half the entire body – including elected officials left, right and center. This event and the letter were widely covered by the media, including the NY Times, the Daily News, and NY1. Many thanks to CM Alexa Aviles for spearheading this effort.
Evidently the Chancellor was not overly impressed, however, because on Thursday, he told the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council that he would be “beta testing” more AI tools on NYC students next year. On Friday, he appeared as a keynote speaker on an AI conference sponsored by Google, on how “education can and will continue to adapt amidst a rapidly evolving AI landscape.” No update yet when the wretched AI guidance will be updated and released. As usual, the Mayor has been noncommittal and done his best to evade this issue when asked about it at press conferences and the like.
Thankfully, the City Council is not ignoring the problems with AI and will be holding joint hearings of the Education and Technology Committees on Student Privacy and AI on Wednesday June 24 at 1 PM. Please sign up to testify in person or remotely if you are concerned about the continued proliferation of AI tools in our schools, and their damaging impact on your children. You can also submit written testimony at the same link. If you do, please share it with us at info@studentprivacymatters.org .
Disappointing news on Class Size
On Thursday, hundreds of schools received an impersonal mass email from the DOE saying that their application for class size reduction funding for next year was rejected. These schools were also told that they should “continue to reduce class sizes where you are able for SY2026-2027” anyway, though how this could be accomplished with no additional funding is unclear. Many of these schools had already been interviewed and were in the process of hiring additional teachers. Others had worked hard to reconfigure their buildings and classrooms in order to make space for smaller classes.
Also on Thursday, the DOE released a proposed class size “plan” which the Chancellor had promised at the budget hearing would be a detailed, multi-year plan—in contrast to the sketchy documents submitted during the Adams administration. Though the Mayor received an extension of two more years for compliance in return for a promise that he, unlike Eric Adams, was serious about delivering smaller classes to NYC children, sadly there is little evidence of a commitment to real planning and implementation in this document .
Though it is very lengthy, it is lacking in necessary detail as to which changes in policies and practices will be adopted to enable schools to lower class size to mandated levels, especially as regards the more than 600 schools which at their current enrollment do not have the space for smaller classes. Instead, it is full of repetitive, conditional and ambiguous language as well as misleading argumentation.
A typical example of this evasiveness are the 133 schools so overcrowded that the DOE admits more capital construction is needed. Not only do they refuse to name these schools or explain where new schools will be built as a result, they do not even claim that they are committed to doing so at any point in the future. Instead, they write that the “SCA will work to identify viable solutions for these schools in accordance with available funding.”
Instead of adopting any of the cost-effective, practical suggestions on how to accelerate the creation of more classroom space as proposed by the Class Size Working Group report, including aligning school enrollment policies with the smaller classes required by law, DOE seems to be counting on exempting hundreds more schools to add to the more than 120 already exempted this year. In fact, they use the word exemption 35 times in the document and admit they “hope to use the exemption process as part of the overall strategy to comply with the law.”
The only specific reform offered to facilitate school construction is this troubling proposal: “The City is currently engaging with elected officials at the State level on a proposed SEQRA reform that would carve out public school construction projects from environmental review.” The answer to providing NYC students with the smaller classes they need is not to expose them to environmental harm. More serious problems with this document are detailed in our critique here.
Public hearings on this proposed class size “plan” via Zoom will begin Thursday, June 25 for the Bronx public hearing, followed by June 29 for Manhattan, June 30 for Staten Island July 1 for Queens and Brooklyn on July 2, though anyone can speak at any of these hearings, no matter where you live or your child attends school. Sadly, these hearings are even more delayed than usual because of the lateness of the state budget. Please put these dates in your calendar anyway and plan to speak out at least one of these meetings if you care about this issue; more info here, though no registration links are available yet.
FYI, the UFT and CSA also have to sign off on this so-called “plan” before it is sent to the state for approval, so if you are a teacher or school administrator, I’d suggest you contact your union and tell them not to approve any such sketchy document unless the DOE makes major improvements in it, including more transparency and solid commitments.
Final PEP meeting of the school year
The last Panel for Educational Policy meeting of this school year will be held this Wednesday, June 17, 2026, at 6 pm at the Prospects Heights Campus (883 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn). Come to speak out if your school was unfairly rejected for class size funding, or if you feel the DOE should stop the use of AI on your child, or you think there's a crying need to reform DOE contracting, or any of the other problems of this highly dysfunctional government agency.
And thank you if you got to the end of this long message -- because I couldn't figure out what to leave out.
