Sunlight Blog
New NJEA Tax Return: HQ Staff Cuts, Less Teacher Support for Political Spending but NJEA Leadership Still Spends More on Politics
Posted On06/30/2022 byAt long last, a new NJEA IRS filing has been provided to the public, this one a Form 990 for the 2019 tax year (9/1/2019 to 8/31/2020). Because of massive backlogs at the IRS, the public has not seen a NJEA IRS filing since the 2017 tax year. That’s three years of silence about the…Read More
NJ Teachers’ Highest-in-the-Nation Dues Are Secretly Being Used to Fund Murphy’s Political Ambitions
Posted On06/23/2022 bySome things never change. Teachers and New Jersey citizens are being scammed again. Northjersey.com revealed that the NJEA has contributed $750,000 to a Stronger Fairer Forward (SFF), a dark money Super PAC supporting Gov. Murphy run for president. This is a continuation of the role the NJEA played in Murphy’s 2021 re-election. During Murphy’s first…Read More
New Sweeney Center Report on NJ Budget Is a Valuable and Ominous Warning
Posted On06/17/2022 bySunlight wanted to comment on a recent report from former-Senate President Steve Sweeney’s Center for Public Policy at Rowan University. The report is the work of a bipartisan Multi-Year Budget Workgroup and constitutes a valuable contribution to the discussion about New Jersey’s fiscal future. As we approach the beginning of FY2023, it is imperative that…Read More
Newsflash: We Never Needed to Close Schools or Mask Kids During COVID
Posted On06/15/2022 bySunlight is posting an entire piece from NJEdReport because it is so important for New Jersey citizens to know this: New Jersey students’ “staggering” learning loss during COVID school closures is not news. Here’s what is: those school closures and months of remote instruction were unnecessary. Instead, New Jersey and the rest of the country…Read More
More Biased, Substandard “Research” from Mark Weber and NJ Policy Perspective
Posted On06/10/2022 byAnother Mark Weber (a.k.a “Jersey Jazzman”) report for New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP), another example of substandard, biased research. The sad thing is that the media takes what Weber says at face value when they shouldn’t. As Sunlight has documented, there are many, many examples of Weber’s shoddy and biased “research.” Weber returns to a…Read More
More Data Showing NJ Is Losing People and Wealth to Other States: Please Take Note, Tom Moran
Posted On06/06/2022 byThe Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran has been having a back-and-forth with Sunlight over whether New Jersey has an out-migration problem. We respect Moran and have found him to be a good-faith interlocutor and we have some data to add to the discussion. Here’s the argument in a nutshell. Moran contends that New Jersey’s outmigration problem is…Read More
NJEA President Spiller, Are You Calling Teachers Who Vote Republican “Racists” and “White Supremacists”?
Posted On06/02/2022 byNJEA President/Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller had some choice words for Republicans in the aftermath of the Buffalo mass-murder. A Patch report quotes Spiller as saying: “Sadly, racism and white supremacy have become ingrained in the mainstream of today’s Republican Party.“ That’s quite a wholesale indictment of the Republican Party. What’s more, “mainstream” Republicans means most Republicans, so…Read More
New Healthcare Law Saves Millions for School Employees but Taxpayers Are Paying More
Posted On05/31/2022 byMary Ann Koruth of NorthJersey.com brings some needed focus on the reality of the much-heralded 2021 “Chapter 78 relief” law negotiated by then-Senate President Steve Sweeney and the NJEA. In “New state teacher health plan didn’t deliver promised savings, say school districts,” Koruth reports that out of the 158 school districts surveyed, 85% said that…Read More
Deb Cornavaca, the NJEA and Gov. Murphy: A Revolving Door of Special-Interest Influence
Posted On05/18/2022 byWell, well, well, as night follows day, a NJEA political organizer cycles into the Murphy administration as a senior officer and then cycles right back to the NJEA. Murphy’s Deputy Chief of Staff Deborah Cornavaca is leaving to become the NJEA’s Director of Government Relations. Recall that Cornavaca was an NJEA political organizer before she…Read More
Harvard Study: NJ Among the States with the Most School Closures and Learning Loss. What Will Gov. Murphy Do About It?
Posted On05/17/2022 byWhile the NJEA wants to claim that learning loss did not really occur, a new study by Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research sheds some much-needed light on the severity of learning loss due to pandemic-related school closures. While the authors passed no judgments on whether a state’s COVID policies were justified, their conclusions were…Read More