Sunlight’s analysis of the NJEA’s FY2023 Summary Budget shows that the NJEA lost at least -3% of its membership from FY2022 to FY2023.  That brings the total loss from FY2018 to FY2023 to -8.6%.  Sunlight’s analysis uses full-time teacher equivalents, which understates the actual losses, so this data corroborates Sunlight’s public record (OPRA) analysis, which showed a -10.9% loss in membership from 2018 to 2023.*

Since the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in 2018, the NJEA has stopped providing its membership numbers to the public — as well as to its own members.  NJEA leadership does not want anyone — especially members — to know just how many members have quit.  The current NJEA website claims  200,000 members but we know this is overstated.  Indeed, NJEA President Sean Spiller testified to the legislature that membership was “nearly 200,000 active and retired members.”

Sunlight has done its own work by using the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) to measure NJEA membership from before the Janus decision to 2023.  We got data from 17 school districts of varying sizes from all over the state that showed a decline from 21,181 to 18,865, or -10.9%.  That would put overall NJEA membership in the 180,000s.  But we acknowledge that this is only a good estimate.  We continue to look for corroborating information.

So here is what we learned from the FY2023 Summary Budget:

If we do the same exercise from FY2018-FY2023, we find:

This tells us our -10.9% number from our OPRA analysis is a reasonable estimate because an -8.6% loss of full-time-teacher equivalents — full-time teachers pay the highest dues — would imply a higher overall membership loss because all other classes pay lower dues, and many of them have left the NJEA as well.  With dues revenue as a constant, the lower the amount of annual dues, the larger the loss of membership.

Of course, we could forego all this analysis if NJEA leadership would come clean about the actual membership levels.  But they won’t and we know why.  

*  The NJEA has different dues levels for different classes of membership: full-time, part-time, support personnel, retired, etc. For simplicity’s sake, we used full-time teachers’ dues and thus our implied loss of members represents the number of full-time teacher equivalents, not the actual membership loss.  With dues revenue as a constant, since other membership classes pay lower annual dues than full-time teachers, it would indicate larger membership losses.