When Sean Kreyling sat down before the New York City Council’s Education Committee last week, he explained plainly how a $180,000 no-bid contract in Manhattan’s District 3 actually got paid. (His testimony begins at 2:00:13 in the “Meeting Video” link.)
He testified that his company, Language Learning Network, was told in 2023 to bill through two organizations because Department of Education rules stipulate that payments to unapproved vendors cannot exceed $25,000. Kreyling’s company was not an approved vendor, so the payments were broken into $25,000 checks. The official who signed the $180,000 no-bid contract, Kreyling said, was District 3 superintendent at the time: Kamar Samuels, now the chancellor of the nation’s largest school system and currently under formal investigation. Samuels has acknowledged a “lapse in procedure.”
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The nation’s largest school system is preparing to spend $37.9 billion next year, with nearly $13 billion flowing through outside contracts and vendors. The controversy surrounding Samuels may involve only a single contract, but it raises more critical concerns about how the DOE oversees billions of taxpayer dollars.
At no point, Kreyling testified, did the DOE object to the arrangement, request revisions, or flag a compliance concern.
The vendor-approval process also exists in part to vet the people contractors send into classrooms. The investigation that uncovered the contracts began with a complaint about an instructor, placed in two District 3 schools by Kreyling’s company, who had been barred from working in city schools after a 2014 investigation into inappropriate conduct toward students.
Kreyling testified that the DOE’s central office had entered into a settlement with the teacher that maintained his certification. He said a background check revealed no concerns and that he fired the instructor once the history came to light. This shows why vendor approval is essential. Skipping vendor vetting risks skipping the vetting of the personnel these vendors supply.
The city council has increasingly focused on the oversight problem. Contracts under $25,000, which add up to $386 million across the system, receive no oversight. Council Speaker Julie Menin has spent nearly two months seeking detailed information on hundreds of DOE contracts, including no-bid deals. The department blew past her deadline and provided no copies of contracts, a response she called an alarming lack of transparency at the DOE city council hearing last week.
The Mamdani administration’s answer to that request was a line item: $30.3 million in procurement-reform savings for fiscal year 2027, growing to $198.1 million by 2030. The council’s budget responses note that the DOE has provided no details on how it will change its procurement process or how those savings were calculated.
All of this is occurring while public school enrollment remains far below pre-pandemic levels. The system now serves roughly 96,000 fewer students than in 2019–2020, yet its budget continues to grow.
The DOE operates under a contracting structure that differs significantly from those governing most school districts in New York State. Under the state’s General Municipal Law, school districts must competitively bid contracts exceeding $20,000. The DOE, by contrast, uses a separate contracting structure, and its oversight body, the Panel for Educational Policy, reviews only contracts above $1 million—50 times the threshold that binds every other district in the state.
This year’s $922 million savings plan still leaves the fiscal year 2027 budget $2.9 billion higher than the current year’s adopted budget. The city council concluded that the plan does little to offset the DOE’s growth.
The immediate issue is procurement oversight, but the larger challenge is accountability. Taxpayers deserve to know not only how much the department spends, but whether the expenditures deliver value for students.
The real lesson of this controversy is about a school system that has grown increasingly insulated from the accountability mechanisms that govern other public institutions. Mayor Mamdani campaigned on overhauling DOE procurement, conducting annual vendor audits and contract reviews, and tracking every dollar spent. The test now is whether those promises apply to his own chancellor.