School District Data Shows Njea Membership Declined -10% From 2018-2023

The Supreme Court’s Janus Decision Gave Teachers A Choice, And Many Have Chosen To Leave The Njea

Introduction

“[The Wayne Education Association president] certifies that since the SPC email campaign began in 2020 she has noticed far fewer members have chosen to enroll in the Association, and the net result has been a decline in membership.”
— Wayne Education Association complaint to the Public Employment Relations Commission

The data supports the Wayne Education Association (WEA) president’s claim: from the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in 2018 to the fall of 2023, the WEA has lost 102 members, or -7.9% of its membership. Similarly, by the fall of 2023, only 90.2% of the Wayne school district’s 1,314-person bargaining unit were New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) members; that is, 129 district employees were not members. No wonder the WEA is trying to get the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) to block Sunlight Policy Center’s campaign to inform teachers of their 1st Amendment rights and how their highest-in-the-nation dues are spent on politics and excessive executive compensation.

Wayne is the home district of NJEA President Sean Spiller, so if the WEA is losing members, it would strongly suggest that other NJEA affiliates are losing them, too. Sunlight’s analysis of 17 New Jersey school districts found that was indeed the case.

From 2018-23, NJEA Membership Decline Averaged -10.9%

Since the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, which allowed teachers to choose whether to belong to a union, the NJEA has seen a substantial erosion in membership.

Using Open Public Records requests, we analyzed 17 New Jersey school districts of varying sizes and locations where the NJEA is the union representing teachers. As shown in Table 1, we found that they averaged a -10.9% decline in membership from 2018-23.

Every one of the 17 districts lost members, but the decline in five school districts approached a quarter of their membership: East Orange -25.6%; Sparta -23%; Hamilton -22.6%; Hanover Township -19.5%; and Camden -19.2%.

Table 1. From 2018-23, NJEA Membership Drops -10.9%

The NJEA Has Far Fewer Members than the 200,000 It Claims

The NJEA clearly does not want teachers or the public to know its membership levels. It used to provide regularly updated numbers on its website but stopped around the time of Janus. In 2018, the NJEA claimed to have 203,520 members, so a -10.9% decline would imply a loss of 22,183 members and would place 2023 membership at 181,336. The current NJEA website falsely claims that the NJEA has 200,000 members despite the fact that NJEA President Sean Spiller has publicly acknowledged that membership is less than 200,000. The data in Table 1 implies that membership is far below 200,000.

In 2023, NJEA Members Averaged 88.9% of Bargaining Units

The absolute decline in membership shown in Table 1 is real and significant, but it does not take into account that the overall number of employees in a school district can fluctuate due to extraneous factors such as the number of students enrolled, school budgets, out-sourcing, and other factors. To account for such factors, we looked at union membership levels as a percentage of collective bargaining units (CBU). Lower percentages reflect more teachers choosing to leave the NJEA.

Pre-Janus, when teachers were effectively forced to join the NJEA, 99% of teachers were NJEA members. As shown in Table 2, that percentage declined to 88.9% in 2023, a drop of -10%, which mirrors the -10.9% absolute decline in NJEA members.

Notably, NJEA members made up less than 80% of five of the CBUs: East Orange 74.1%; Sparta 75.4%, Hamilton 75.6%; Wyckoff 79%; and Hopatcong 79.2%. Once again, the number of teachers who have chosen not to belong to the NJEA in these districts approaches a quarter of the overall bargaining unit.

Table 2. 2023 NJEA Members as % of CBUs: 88.9%

Conclusion

The data is compelling and convincing. The sample size of 21,222 teachers from 17 school districts of varying sizes and locations around the state provides a sufficient basis to assert that NJEA membership declined by approximately -10% from 2018 to 2023. We looked at the data two different ways to account for possible fluctuations in school district payrolls, and both indicated a similar -10% decline.

Based on these analyses, we estimate that NJEA membership is currently around 181,000. This is substantially below the 200,000 advertised on the NJEA’s website (which even NJEA President Spiller has acknowledged is an incorrect number). We are left to approximate the NJEA’s membership levels because the NJEA used to provide updated membership levels but stopped around the time of the Janus decision. Now it looks like we know why.

From this, we conclude that once teachers learned that they had a choice, and then learned how NJEA leadership was spending their highest-in-the-nation dues on politics and excessive executive compensation, many teachers chose to stop paying dues and leave the NJEA.

We take that as a validation of our campaign, just as the WEA president certified to PERC. Our goal has always been to empower teachers with the facts so they can make the best decision for themselves. It looks like they are doing exactly that.

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