A TikTok of NJEA President Sean Spiller FINALLY Admitting that Teachers’ Regular Dues are Funding His Run for Governor

The dam has indeed broken. After the New York Times and NJ.com stated unequivocally that NJEA members’ regular dues were being used to fund NJEA President Sean Spiller’s vanity run for governor, Spiller was finally forced to admit it (see below). Sort of.  In a dissembling sort of way. But note that it is April 2025, and that the first dues money was spent on Spiller in September 2022.  For two-and-a-half years, NJEA members were kept in the dark about this use of their highest-in-the-nation dues.*

A friendly teacher sent us a TikTok of Spiller being interviewed, apparently at a campaign event with teachers.  We urge our readers to watch it because it will immediately be clear how much dissembling is going on and how badly Spiller still wants to keep the truth from teachers.  NJEA leadership (including the self-interested Spiller) has worked long and hard to deceive teachers into believing that their mandatory, annual dues were not being spent on politics, so it is difficult for them to admit it.

Here’s a transcription:

Interviewer:

“Are NJEA dues paying for your campaign?”

Spiller:

“Right now we are working to get … you know … I’m going to say small-dollar donors but I’ll also take big-dollar donors if any of you have it … but we’re working to get dollars from every single person for us in the state. We’re really proud of the dollars we’ve pulled in. But also as a union we have a process we go through. We’ve endorsed candidates each and every year. We’ve done it with previous governor, current governor, and governors before, and we’re happy to use those dollars, which are members’ dues, members’ PAC, members’ collective power and organizing, to support those candidates. We’ve done it in every election. We’re doing it in this election as well.” [Emphasis added.]

Got it? Mixed into that word salad of dissimulation is Spiller’s admission. Note that Spiller slyly attaches “members’ dues” to “members’ PAC,” which refers to NJEA PAC, the NJEA’s traditional PAC. NJEA PAC is funded by teachers’ voluntary dues and its activities have been extensively publicized to teachers. This is why most teachers believe NJEA PAC is the sum-total of NJEA political spending, and Spiller wants to keep up that deception. It tells you all you need to know about how Spiller and NJEA leadership have approached the issue: they don’t want teachers to know the truth!

So now, at long last, it’s an established fact and Spiller’s candidacy is being summarized thus (in NJ.com today):

New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller is also running in the left lane — and to be New Jersey’s first Black governor. But his chief target is, well, members of the teacher’s union he runs. The $35 million in union dues behind all his ads is nothing to sniff at. But will some of these teachers (and other Democratic voters) resent that he’s spending their dues this way? [Emphasis added].

Sunlight is going to take a small bow here. We have been saying for years that NJEA leadership was spending teachers’ regular dues on politics, but NJEA leadership had succeeded in deceiving their members into believing otherwise.  It took Spiller’s vanity run for governor to finally get the press to dig into the facts, and now they have. Even Sean Spiller has been forced to admit it.  Hallelujah!

*In July 2024, NJEA Vice President Steve Beatty penned a piece in the New Jersey Globe that obliquely admitted that members’ regular dues were being used to fund the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward.  Unmentioned was the fact that Garden State Forward was being used covertly to fund two pro-Spiller Super PACs, Protecting Our Democracy and Working New Jersey.  Tellingly, the Globe piece was never published on any of the NJEA’s main interfaces with teachers.

** $35 million for Working New Jersey and $5 million previously sent to Protecting Our Democracy, the platform for Spiller’s candidacy prior to his official announcement.