This is ludicrous. A 33-year-old New York City Department of Education administrator is pocketing a principal’s salary of $192,374 a year for running a high school that does not exist and was never approved.
Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, who also performs as the rapper Cal Combs, was handpicked in January to serve as project director of the proposed Next Generation Technology High School in Lower Manhattan. The promotion came with a $50,000 raise from his prior assistant principal pay of $141,960 at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem.
Months later the school is dead, he is not assigned to any actual campus, and the checks keep clearing.
Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels killed the proposal in April after opposition over its merit-based admissions model and broader anxiety about artificial intelligence in classrooms. The planned FiDi school was supposed to focus on AI and computer technology. Instead it became another casualty of the city’s allergy to anything resembling rigorous standards.
A project director of a planned school normally becomes its principal once doors open. That never happened here. According to the New York Post, a DOE source said officials “never should have named a principal before the school was approved” and that, without tenure, such appointees are typically returned to assistant principal roles when a project collapses. Haraguchi-Combs never served as principal long enough to seek tenure in the role.
The Department of Education’s official line is that he is “developing new proposals and supporting in-progress proposals.” A DOE insider strongly disputed that framing, calling the continued principal-level compensation a huge waste of resources when actual schools need principals.
When a Post reporter approached Haraguchi-Combs outside his Downtown Brooklyn high-rise this week, the response was not an explanation of his duties. “You came to my house? Outrageous,” he said.
The arrangement surfaced in an October letter from anonymous Manhattan high school principals demanding an investigation into Superintendent Gary Beidleman. The letter catalogued organizational dysfunction, hiring of unqualified candidates, failure to meet class-size rules, and specifically flagged Haraguchi-Combs’ status.
Zilvinas Silenas, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, called the salary an insult to taxpayers. “This is a new level for New York, when you are getting paid nearly $200,000 for a job you’re not doing,” Silenas said. “Most taxpayers have never even dreamed of making that kind of money.”
Haraguchi-Combs calls himself “half hip-hop artist, half English teacher.” His 2017 album “Carmel,” named for an Indiana city where he once lived, includes lyrics describing a drug deal that turned violent: “So now I got a nine hidden in my backpack… They said that they would meet us at the spot at seven thirty/we packed a bag and arrived five minutes early.”
Another track, “Roundabouts,” references cocaine use and heavy drinking: “One more bump on that key/one more drink and I’m free/one more shot to forget/how much I hate me.”
He began his education career as an English teacher in Tokyo in 2015 and took his wife’s last name. A Manhattan Center official confirmed he is no longer at that school.
New York already spends more per pupil than almost any other state while producing mediocre results. Paying nearly two hundred thousand dollars to an unassigned project director whose proposed selective tech school was scrapped for ideological reasons is not an anomaly. It is the system working as designed.
Scripture is blunt on the subject: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
Taxpayers who do work are funding both the salary and the administrative apparatus that refuses to reassign or demote him.
Schools that actually open still struggle with vacancies, overcrowding, and the fallout from earlier decisions that prioritized equity rhetoric over competence. Haraguchi-Combs’ situation, brought to light by fellow principals tired of the dysfunction under Beidleman, shows how far the Department of Education has drifted from any basic expectation that public employees do the jobs for which they are paid.
The school never existed. The paycheck does.
