New York City is paying a 33-year-old educator and rapper more than $192,000 a year to serve as “project director” of a public high school that was never allowed to open.
Caleb Haraguchi-Combs was vice principal at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, earning over $140,000 a year, when he was tapped earlier this year to lead the planned Next Generation Technology High School, according to the New York Post. That role typically comes with the responsibilities of a principal.
There was never a school for him to run. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels killed the proposal in April. The Post reported the cancellation followed objections to the school’s merit-based admissions model and broader unease about putting artificial intelligence at the center of a curriculum.
The city has since moved further in that direction. In September, education officials banned generative AI tools for students from early childhood through eighth grade, as Breitbart News has reported.
Haraguchi-Combs no longer holds his old assistant principal post at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. The Department of Education says he is now “developing new proposals and supporting in-progress proposals” — language the Post describes as standard for project directors whose schools never materialize.
A DOE source disputed that this is business as usual, telling the Post that without tenure, a principal whose school doesn’t open normally gets sent back to an assistant principal role. The source said officials never should have named him principal before the school was even approved.
A side career in music
Haraguchi-Combs also records as a rapper. One of his songs, “War Propaganda,” is available on Apple Music. Its lyrics ask why politicians are “losing it” with their power and describe “a war going on outside no one is safe from.”
The episode surfaces as New York City schools face separate scrutiny: teachers across the system are reportedly passing nearly 100 percent of their students, even as large numbers of those students struggle with basic math and reading.
