NYC schools chancellor swimming waist-deep in system's corrupt waste

Kamar Samuels, the city schools chancellor, is now enmeshed in a personal scandal — and a far larger systemic one.Both were on display this week as his Department of Education minions tried the old “dog ate my homework” excuse as they refused to share contracting information with the City Council.

The DOE spends about a quarter of its $43 billion budget on these contracts, yet Chief Procurement Officer Elisheba Lewi testified that it would “take months” to produce the info for the council, as it’s all on “a secure system that very few people have access to.” If that’s not an outright lie, then the DOE has no way to monitor these outlays for fraud, waste or other abuse — which is even more damning: They can’t truly explain $10 billion a year in outlays.“I mean, this should take like an hour of work to do,” Speaker Julie Menin rightly summed up of the DOE’s “inability” to cough up the info.Then again, that failure is convenient at a time when Samuels is under the microscope for his part in a shady no-bid contracting scandal centered on his role as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3.Last week, The Post’s David Spector reported exclusively that Samuels had approved a $180,000 no-bid contract (to provide temporary foreign-language teachers) with a non-DOE-approved vendor — and then let a subordinate take the fall.And then, as chancellor, he gave her a lucrative promotion: Loyalty rewarded? Samuels allegedly authorized the contract — then split the payments into $25,000 chunks in an apparent effort to circumvent reporting rules, and finally killed the contract early after it began to attract notice because the contractor had provided a teacher already banned from the city’s schools.The New York Times, catching up this week (doubtless with the help of sources hoping that the paper’s clueless education reporters and editors can provide cover for the corruption), reports the Special Commissioner of Investigation has opene...