More Optics: NJEA Leadership Launches Campaign to Inform Teachers “How Their Dues Are Spent.” Here Are Some Questions Teachers Should Ask About the Spiller Debacle.

In what looks like an implicit mea culpa for wasting $45 million of member dues on former-president Sean Spiller’s vanity run for governor, NJEA leadership is conducting a virtual campaign to inform members about “how your dues dollars work for you.” A friendly teacher sent us the message announcing the campaign below, which describes a March 23, 2026 virtual information session (register here) on the NJEA’s budget process and how member dues are spent to benefit members. But as we explain, member participation in the virtual campaign will be highly controlled, making it unlikely that any questions relating to the Spiller Debacle will be asked or answered. And we note below that NJEA leadership continues to deceive members about how their dues are spent in its Delegate Assembly minutes. As we said previously, there’s been a post-Spiller Debacle change in tone and optics but nothing more. New leadership is the same as old leadership. The scandal continues.

Member participation will be highly controlled. We note that questions must be submitted beforehand and will then be answered during the session. In other words, questions will be pre-screened and none will be permitted to be asked live. We’re guessing that means leadership’s role in the Spiller Debacle — including hiding the truth about how members’ dues were being spent — will not be one of the topics discussed. And we’d guess that this is the reason the campaign is on-line: leadership has no intention of placing themselves in a position where they would have to respond to inconvenient questions from actual members in real time.

Some questions teachers should ask. Here a link to register for the March 23 session. We would encourage teachers to ask questions about the Spiller Debacle and report back how they were handled:

• Was $45 million of members’ regular, annual dues spent on Spiller’s vanity run?
• Did NJEA leadership ever inform members that their dues were to be spent in this way? If so, how?
• Will there ever be an explanation of how these decisions were made and who was responsible for them?
• Will there ever be an accounting for how the $45 million was spent and who was paid what?
• Will there be any governance reforms to prevent this from ever happening again?
• Will there ever be any accountability for this profligate and dishonest waste of dues?

Delegate Assembly minutes still hide the truth. We also note that, despite the optics of the virtual campaign, the NJEA continues to deceive teachers about how their regular dues are spent on politics. In the March issue of NJEA Review, there are (highly edited) Delegate Assembly minutes from Oct. 11, 2025. [NJEA leadership is finally publishing minutes for DA meetings that are more recent than two years old, which was the case before Sunlight pointed out the brazen lack of transparency]. In the minutes, it’s disclosed that $3.4 million for “independent expenditures” be transferred from the 2024-25 budget to the 2025-26 budget, along with an additional transfer of $3.6 million to “cost center 0471 Organizational Projects to cover independent expenditures related to the election campaigns.” Let us translate: leadership is moving $7 million to the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, to spend on politics, and ALL of that $7 million comes from teachers’ annual dues. From the NJEA’s description, a typical teacher would have no idea that another $7 million of her dues were to be spent on politics. That’s intentional.

So the NJEA’s new mission statement and the above-advertised campaign to inform teachers about how their dues are spent are just changes in tone and optics. At root, they are just another dishonest attempt by leadership to deceive their own members. Nothing of substance as changed: new leadership is the same as the old leadership. The scandal continues.