Bergen County EA President Defends NJEA Transparency But Is Not Transparent About the NJEA’s Super PAC

The president of the Bergen County Education Association, Sue McBride, penned an op-ed in the New Jersey Globe in defense of the NJEA against “editorials and anti-union propaganda,” meaning the Star-Ledger editorial board and Sunlight Policy Center, respectively.  We’ll let the Star-Ledger speak for itself, but McBride evades Sunlight’s main point: that teachers have been kept in the dark about the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward.  She says a lot about internal NJEA processes Sunlight has never criticized but does not even mention Garden State Forward.  Her intended audience is teachers, so McBride’s op-ed looks like a deflection meant to keep teachers in the dark about Garden State Forward.  

First, we challenge McBride’s characterizations of Sunlight. She doesn’t mention Sunlight by name, but we know she is referring to us when she says “anti-union propaganda” because the NJEA has placed us on its “Propaganda Watch.” She gives Sunlight “a solid F for factual accuracy.” But this is false: everything Sunlight has written about the NJEA, and in particular about Garden State Forward, is true.  We defy McBride to identify a single assertion that Sunlight has made — just one — that is not factual.  Can she?

McBride accurately describes in detail several internal NJEA processes: the election of delegates, the Delegate Assembly, the various delegate committees, and NJEA PAC, the NJEA’s traditional PAC.  But Sunlight has never criticized the transparency of these entities and processes.  Rather, we described NJEA PAC as a “model of transparency” and contrasted it with the opacity of Garden State Forward.

Here are some facts about Garden State Forward:

• Unlike NJEA PAC, which is funded by a separate dues stream that teachers must opt into, Garden State Forward is funded by teachers’ regular dues.  Most teachers do not know Garden State Forward exists, let alone that they are funding it.
• Unlike NJEA PAC, where endorsements and contributions are decided by a delegate committee in an open process, Garden State Forward’s spending is directed by NJEA headquarters staff in Trenton via an opaque and little understood process.
• Unlike NJEA PAC, where a search of the NJEA website for “NJEA PAC” results in pages of articles, a website search for “Garden State Forward” results in nothing: “Sorry, but nothing matched your search terms. Please try again with different keywords.”
• Unlike NJEA PAC, which is often mentioned in great detail in the NJEA’s monthly magazine for teachers, NJEA Review, Garden State Forward has NEVER been mentioned in NJEA Review.
• The same is true for the NJEA’s Delegate Assembly minutes, which appear in the NJEA Review: Garden State Forward has NEVER been mentioned in the Delegate Assembly minutes.
• Garden State Forward has NEVER been mentioned in the annual budgets presented to teachers in NJEA Review.  Instead, NJEA leadership has used “Organizational Projects” for the line-item that covers Garden State Forward spending.  There’s no way a teacher would know that represents Garden State Forward.
• Garden State Forward is the NJEA’s primary vehicle for political spending.  For tax-years 2012-21, Garden State Forward spent $64.6 million compared to $10 million for NJEA PAC.

That’s $64.6 million of teachers’ regular dues being used for political spending that’s being hidden from teachers.  That’s not transparent.  We would assert to McBride that there cannot be “democracy” without transparency.  How can teachers “vote” for or against something if they do not know it exists?

In the end, McBride’s piece is a deliberate deflection. Everything she says about NJEA governance is true so far as it goes, but Sunlight never took issue with the aspects she defends. Our issue has been with Garden State Forward, which McBride does not address. Given that her intended audience is teachers, this evasion makes her op-ed look like another part of the NJEA’s plan to keep teacher in the dark about Garden State Forward. 

Perhaps McBride can write another op-ed where she drops the name-calling and addresses the main point of our criticism: Garden State Forward.  That would be transparent.