Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman is at it again.  The founder of the New Jersey Public Education Coalition (NJPEC) recently took to the pages of NJEdReport to decry parents ostensibly using their children as “spies” to expose “woke” indoctrination in public school classrooms.  Gottesman claims that, by such actions, the “radical right” aims to “divide parents from teachers.”  Gottesman then points out the “hypocrisy” of anti-government types playing “Big Brother” in the classroom.

But who is the real hypocrite?  Gottesman accuses the “radical right” of dividing parents from teachers, and yet on NJPEC’s website, there is a section entitled “Report Questionable Activity” that aims to enlist teachers to inform on parents speaking up at school board meetings.  NJPEC’s online reporting tool is clearly aimed at teachers because it is virtually identical to the NJEA’s own online reporting tool, which is explicitly provided for teachers to inform on parents.  Like the NJEA’s online form for teachers, NJPEC’s form asks of the informant: “Please do not use your school email address.”

The NJEA-NJPEC target for these teacher-informers is the post-pandemic wave of New Jersey parents who pushed back against what they saw being taught in schools.  In many districts these parents won elections for school board and in some cases took them over.  NJEA-NJPEC’s explicit goal is to fight back by supporting their own favored candidates in order to “protect the integrity of our boards of education” — a.k.a. the NJEA-dominated status quo.

The facts show that both the NJEA and NJPEC are pushing teachers to inform on parents, which is divisive in the extreme.  So it is actually Gottesman and NJPEC who are dividing parents from teachers!  

Of course, the identical online reporting tools are another sign that NJPEC is a NJEA front.  NJPEC’s website directly links to the NJEA’s Center for Education Honesty (CEH) as the sole resource in its “Resources” section.  As even the casual observer will see, much of the verbiage on the CEH and NJPEC websites is the same.  And as Sunlight has exhaustively detailed, NJPEC is funded by and an affiliate of the dark-money Super PAC Education Truth Project (ETP), and there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that ETP is funded by the NJEA/NEA (here, here, here, and here).  If ETP is funded by NJEA/NEA, then so is NJPEC.

Gottesman is a hyprocrite, who seeks to divide parents from teachers.  Nor is this the first time Gottesman has stooped to mendacious hypocrisy in order to attack his opponents.

Again we warn New Jersey citizens and school boards: when you see Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman in action, know that mendacity and hypocrisy are sure to follow.  And know that all the arrows point to the NJEA/NEA being behind him.