The NJEA's conflict of interest policy is clear, and NJEA President/gubernatorial candidate Sean Spiller has violated it by his actions and, at the very least, by the appearance of a conflict of interest.

As NJEA president, Spiller has a fiduciary duty to teachers to act in their best interests. By using the NJEA's Super PAC, Garden State Forward, to spend $40 million backing Spiller's vanity run for governor, NJEA leadership (including the self-interested Spiller) is not acting in teachers' best interests. 

The NJEA has institutional mechanisms to express teachers' collective will, including an elected Delegate Assembly and various committees made up of delegates.  The NJEA's traditional PAC, NJEA PAC is run by such a committee and is funded by voluntary dues, so it can fairly be said to be in teachers' best interests.  No conflict here.

In contrast, Garden State Forward is run by three top NJEA executives (including the self-interested Spiller) in a completely opaque process and is funded by teachers' mandatory, annual dues.  Even worse, NJEA leadership hides the existence of Garden State Forward, so few, if any, teachers know their dues are funding Spiller's run.  That does not reflect teachers' best interests and is a conflict of interest.

This is the third time in his political career that Spiller has had a conflict of interest, and the third time he has ignored it.  This time, it's his own union and NJEA leadership is complicit. 

When teachers learn the facts about how their dues are being spent, many are choosing to leave.

In its petition to the New Jersey Public Relations Employment Commission, the Wayne Education Association (WEA) certified the reason it was trying to block Sunlight’s digital ad and email campaign: once teachers learned about the facts Sunlight presented, many were choosing to leave the WEA.  So we decided to find out just how many had left the WEA as well as the statewide New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) since the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in 2018.

Using two methods of analysis, we determined that about 9% of the WEA had left, as had 9.3 – 9.7% of the NJEA.  With a pre-Janus membership of 203,520, that indicates a loss of at least 18,000 members for the NJEA, which would place current membership around 185,000, far less than the 200,000 claimed on the NJEA website.

Of course, the NJEA knows exactly how many members it has, and it is revealing that they continue to exaggerate their membership.  NJEA leadership does not want teachers to know just how many of them are choosing to vote with their feet.

The NJEA used to be a teachers’ association concerned primarily with education and the well-being of teachers, but today’s NJEA is a dues-funded political machine.  Now NJEA leadership is doubling down by turning the NJEA into one, giant “Spiller for Governor” Super PAC — and using teachers’ dues to do it.  Our research shows that when teachers learn these facts, they leave.

The NJEA controls all their dues but today’s teachers have never voted on their local’s relationship with the NJEA.

You read that right.  It’s almost certain that no current New Jersey teacher has ever voted on whether they want the NJEA as their collective bargaining representative.  That’s because the NJEA was elected over 50 years ago and has never had to stand for another vote.

We know from teacher feedback that they like their local unions.  Local union officers are elected by the local teachers and spend most of their time working on behalf of teachers on the local issues that teachers care about.  But in the NJEA system, 85% of dues go to the NJEA and the NEA (its national parent) where it is spent on state and national politics and excessive compensation for top execs.  Only 12% goes to the local.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Other unions keep most of the money at the local level, giving them the power to spend it as they wish and lower dues.  We ask: If teachers had a choice, would they prefer to control their own dues money?  Would they want to limit extraneous spending in order to reduce their highest-in-the-nation dues?

New Jersey law allows for replacing an existing union like the NJEA.  Teachers do not have to be stuck with a union that was elected over 50 years ago. They do not have to watch helplessly as their hard-earned dollars get automatically siphoned off and used for things they don’t approve of.  They can control their own money.  All they need to do is decertify the NJEA and vote in a new, replacement union.

Against the vast majority of New Jersey citizens and parents, according to a recent Monmouth poll.

Post-pandemic learning loss and increased student misbehavior are making it harder for teachers to teach and causing many to leave the profession altogether.  What is their union leadership, the NJEA leadership, doing about it?  Nothing.

Rather than helping teachers teach, the NJEA is adding to their burdens by pushing teachers to fight local culture wars against the vast majority of citizens and parents across the state.  When it comes to parental notification, the teaching of gender identity to grades 1-5, allowing gender-birth boys to play girls sports, and allowing bathroom use by gender identity, the Monmouth poll shows that NJEA-promoted policies are far out of step with the rest of New Jersey.  And yet NJEA leadership is pushing teachers to becomes local advocates for these deeply unpopular policies.

All of this is being paid for by New Jersey teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues.  Sunlight asks: how is it in teachers’ best interest for them and their dues to be used to fight the culture wars?  It’s not.  Yet teachers have no say in the matter.  What a raw deal.

The NJEA is not the biggest teachers union but leadership pays themselves the most compensation.  By far.

More than the leadership of its parent, National Education Association and more than the leadership of the other large state teachers unions in California, New York and Pennsylvania.

From 2018-20, the average pay for the top ten NJEA execs was $752,726, well within the New Jersey top one percent and over ten times what the average teacher is paid.  During his career as an NJEA exec, former-Executive Director Ed Richardson amassed an astounding $9.3 million, which must be some sort of record for a teachers union boss.

ALL paid for by New Jersey teachers, whose annual dues are the highest in the nation.  By far.  NJEA leadership has made themselves one-percenters on the backs of teachers.  If teachers knew these facts, they would be outraged.

It sure looks like the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) is funding another dark money Super PAC, this time aimed squarely at parents running for their local school boards this fall.

So, parents, beware!  The NJEA is coming after you with TV ads, opposition research, union-friendly candidates trained and supported by the NJEA, and now with piles of dark money.

 “Let’s be clear, the challenges created by the current staffing shortages are systemic and have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but they existed before it began.”

– David Aberhold, Superintendent for West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District and President of the Garden State Coalition of Schools.

THE POLL$ HAVE CLO$ED…. AND WE CAN NOW PROJECT THE REAL WINNER$ OF LAST WEEK’$ ELECTION…

Congratulation$ to Brendan Gill, Steve DiMicco and Brad Lawrence!

When Sunlight Policy Center first delved into the NJEA’s support for its current president, Sean Spiller’s, mayoral run, we determined that Spiller had raised $57,000, of which $36,000 came from the NJEA and its allies.

WE WERE WRONG!  VERY WRONG!  IT WAS MORE, MUCH, MUCH MORE!!

How has the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) – a private, special interest – become the most powerful political force in the state?

By rigging the system to secure annual, automatic taxpayer funding. Since 1994, over $2.1 billion in taxpayer funding, reaching a record $129 million in 2018.

Decades ago, the NJEA used it political clout to lobby lawmakers to construct a funding system that guaranteed the annual flow of tens of millions of property tax dollars directly into its coffers. School districts collect the property taxes that pay teacher salaries and then withhold the teachers’ dues from their paychecks. Over 80 percent of these dues flow up to the NJEA. School districts and teachers are thus rendered mere pass-throughs for property tax dollars to flow directly into the NJEA’s treasury. The teachers never see the money.