The Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey (SPCNJ) Research Reports inform citizens, policymakers, and the media about the nature and underlying causes of NJ’s special-interest status quo. SPCNJ will continue to broaden our efforts to give New Jersey residents the transparency they deserve and work to put our state back on the path to future prosperity.
Below is the list of our latest reports which you can filter by category or keyword.
2025 Apr 04 - NJEA PRESIDENT SEAN SPILLER VIOLATES THE NJEA'S OWN CONFLICT OF INTEREST POLICY
The NJEA's conflict of interest policy is clear, and NJEA President/gubernatorial candidate Sean Spiller has violated it by his actions and, at the very least, by the appearance of a conflict of interest.
As NJEA president, Spiller has a fiduciary duty to teachers to act in their best interests. By using the NJEA's Super PAC, Garden State Forward, to spend $40 million backing Spiller's vanity run for governor, NJEA leadership (including the self-interested Spiller) is not acting in teachers' best interests.
The NJEA has institutional mechanisms to express teachers' collective will, including an elected Delegate Assembly and various committees made up of delegates. The NJEA's traditional PAC, NJEA PAC is run by such a committee and is funded by voluntary dues, so it can fairly be said to be in teachers' best interests. No conflict here.
In contrast, Garden State Forward is run by three top NJEA executives (including the self-interested Spiller) in a completely opaque process and is funded by teachers' mandatory, annual dues. Even worse, NJEA leadership hides the existence of Garden State Forward, so few, if any, teachers know their dues are funding Spiller's run. That does not reflect teachers' best interests and is a conflict of interest.
This is the third time in his political career that Spiller has had a conflict of interest, and the third time he has ignored it. This time, it's his own union and NJEA leadership is complicit.
2024 Dec 06 - DON'T BE FOOLED: AFTER TAXES AND LIVING COSTS, NEW JERSEY TEACHERS EARN LESS THAN TEACHERS IN GEORGIA AND TEXAS
New Jersey teachers are not nearly as well paid as the NJEA's parent, the NEA, claims. According to the NEA, teachers in states with collective bargaining (like New Jersey) have 26% higher salaries than teachers in states without it. The NEA ranks New Jersey 6th, while the two largest states without collective bargaining - Georgia and Texas - rank 20th and 29th respectively.
But the NEA data is flawed: it does not account for the real world of taxes and cost of living that New Jersey teachers actually live in. Sunlight found that once New Jersey's very high taxes and cost of living are accounted for, teachers in Georgia had 4.2% higher salaries, and Texas 3.2% higher.
By misleading teachers with claims of higher salaries, the NEA does New Jersey teachers a disservice. Teachers should know that their salaries are not nearly as high as claimed and that they are actually underpaid compared to other states like Georgia and Texas.
2024 Oct 03 - Post -Janus, The NJEA Has Lost Over 9% Of Its Members
When teachers learn the facts about how their dues are being spent, many are choosing to leave.
In its petition to the New Jersey Public Relations Employment Commission, the Wayne Education Association (WEA) certified the reason it was trying to block Sunlight’s digital ad and email campaign: once teachers learned about the facts Sunlight presented, many were choosing to leave the WEA. So we decided to find out just how many had left the WEA as well as the statewide New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) since the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in 2018.
Using two methods of analysis, we determined that about 9% of the WEA had left, as had 9.3 – 9.7% of the NJEA. With a pre-Janus membership of 203,520, that indicates a loss of at least 18,000 members for the NJEA, which would place current membership around 185,000, far less than the 200,000 claimed on the NJEA website.
Of course, the NJEA knows exactly how many members it has, and it is revealing that they continue to exaggerate their membership. NJEA leadership does not want teachers to know just how many of them are choosing to vote with their feet.
The NJEA used to be a teachers’ association concerned primarily with education and the well-being of teachers, but today’s NJEA is a dues-funded political machine. Now NJEA leadership is doubling down by turning the NJEA into one, giant “Spiller for Governor” Super PAC — and using teachers’ dues to do it. Our research shows that when teachers learn these facts, they leave.
2024 Jul 31 - NJEA Leadership Has A Lot To Answer For When It Comes To Teachers’ Pensions
They neglected their members’ pensions while taking care of themselves.
When it comes to their pensions, New Jersey teachers have a lot to be upset about. Nearly half of them have significantly reduced pensions. All of them have pensions that are severely underfunded. How did this happen?
The facts show that in the 1990s and 2000s NJEA leadership made fateful and ultimately disastrous decisions. They bet teachers’ pensions on gaining them the non-forfeitable right to their pension benefits. They took the lead in political deals that allowed “surplus” assets to be substituted for required pension contributions. They irresponsibly enhanced benefits without securing sound funding for them. They looked on while TPAF’s unfunded liabilities climbed to unsustainable levels. They allowed TPAF to deteriorate until insolvency threatened.
And then they were forced by political reality to accept the Chapter 78 reforms because the pension system was in crisis. Yet the non-forfeitable right ensured that most of the pain was inflicted on prospective teachers in the form of reduced pensions.
Meanwhile, using the dues of those very same teachers, NJEA leadership made sure their own pensions were both gold-plated and overfunded. NJEA leadership took care of themselves but not their members. They have a lot to answer for.
2024 Jun 26 - Now We Know: NJEA Leadership Has Already Spent $5 Million of Teachers' Dues Supporting NJEA President Sean Spiller's Personal Super PAC
Is supporting Spiller in the best interests of ALL teachers?
We now know NJEA President/ex-Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller is running for governor and the NJEA is all-in supporting him. What we didn’t know was that in addition to the $2 million NJEA leadership — including Spiller — gave to Spiller’s personal Super PAC, Protecting Our Democracy, in 2024, they also gave another $3 million in 2022 — contributions that were not reported to New Jersey’s elections watchdog. All of this came from the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, and thus all of it was funded by New Jersey teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues.
Spiller’s conflict of interest is massive and manifest. Is it in teachers’ best interest to spend $5 million of their dues on Spiller’s personal political ambitions? And how many more millions will be spent as Spiller runs for governor?
Even worse, NJEA leadership hides the existence of Garden State Forward, so most teachers have no idea it exists, let alone that they are funding it. They are being forced to support Spiller without their knowledge or consent.
Spiller will run as a progressive Democrat, but what if a teacher is a Republican or an independent? What if a teacher simply doesn’t want her hard-earned dues spent on politics? Too bad. She doesn’t have a choice.
On top of this, Spiller is a controversial political figure who did not run for re-election in Montclair because he was so unpopular he would have lost badly. Spiller also has potential criminal liability for misuse of state health benefits hanging over his head.
We ask if Spiller is the kind of candidate teachers would choose to support. Not that they have a choice. What a rotten deal.
2024 Jun 05 - Even With Record Contributions And Strong Returns, Teachers’ Pension Plan Treads Water
TPAF is still only 34.7%-funded, or 47% including lottery assets.
New Jersey’s largest pension plan, the Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund (TPAF), is not healthy. Despite the record-billions Gov. Murphy has contributed and the addition of 78% of the state’s annual lottery proceeds, TPAF is still reliant on positive investment returns to avoid having to deplete its assets to meet its annual benefit payments to retirees.
As a result, TPAF is treading water. In FY2021, pension investments posted a record 28.6% return and TPAF’s assets grew by $5 billion. In FY2022, investments lost -7.9% and assets shrunk by -$2 billion. So despite strong returns of 9.2% in FY2023, assets only grew by $2 billion. Meanwhile TPAF’s liabilities continued to grow by $2 billion a year. The result: TPAF’s FY2023 34.7% funded ratio (the amount of money set aside to pay for future liabilities) was actually lower than FY2021’s 35.5%.
A 34.7% funded ratio is not healthy. TPAF’s internal dynamics are so weak that even with Gov. Christie’s addition of the $9.6 billion lottery asset, TPAF’s liabilities were still only 47%-funded.
Murphy’s state budgets have benefited from large, pandemic-related revenue windfalls that have allowed him to massively increase pension funding, but a deep recession could change the picture dramatically. Yet Murphy continues to refuse to do the the hard work of restructuring TPAF. To please his biggest political supporter, the NJEA, he is continuing to pour billions of good (taxpayer) money after bad. Good for Murphy and the NJEA, terrible for the teachers and the state.
2024 May 22 - The NJEA v. Local Unions: The Local Unions Make and the NJEA Takes
The NJEA controls all their dues but today’s teachers have never voted on their local’s relationship with the NJEA.
You read that right. It’s almost certain that no current New Jersey teacher has ever voted on whether they want the NJEA as their collective bargaining representative. That’s because the NJEA was elected over 50 years ago and has never had to stand for another vote.
We know from teacher feedback that they like their local unions. Local union officers are elected by the local teachers and spend most of their time working on behalf of teachers on the local issues that teachers care about. But in the NJEA system, 85% of dues go to the NJEA and the NEA (its national parent) where it is spent on state and national politics and excessive compensation for top execs. Only 12% goes to the local.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other unions keep most of the money at the local level, giving them the power to spend it as they wish and lower dues. We ask: If teachers had a choice, would they prefer to control their own dues money? Would they want to limit extraneous spending in order to reduce their highest-in-the-nation dues?
New Jersey law allows for replacing an existing union like the NJEA. Teachers do not have to be stuck with a union that was elected over 50 years ago. They do not have to watch helplessly as their hard-earned dollars get automatically siphoned off and used for things they don’t approve of. They can control their own money. All they need to do is decertify the NJEA and vote in a new, replacement union.
2024 May 20 - Gov. Murphy Continues To Fiddle While The Teachers’ Pension Fund Burns
Even after Governor Murphy spent billions for additional funding, the Teachers’ Pension and Annuity Fund (TPAF) was 33.9% funded for FY2022. That means that the state has less than 34 cents set aside for every dollar it owes to retirees. This is a crisis condition.
That’s why a recent Urban Institute study placed TPAF in the “Deep Red” category — as one of the nine worst public pensions funds in America. TPAF is projected to run out of money in 20 years or less, which would be a disaster for New Jersey.
FY 2022 shows why. Because TPAF is structurally unsound, poor investment returns meant that TPAF had to sell $1.89 billion in assets to meet its annual payments to retirees. Meanwhile, TPAF’s liabilities continued to climb. The result was a 33.9% funded ratio.
Yet Murphy continues to refuse to do the the hard work of restructuring TPAF. To please his biggest political supporter, the NJEA, he is pouring billions of good (taxpayer) money after bad. Pandemic-related revenue windfalls have allowed Murphy to increase state spending to record levels, but what happens when these windfalls go away?
2024 Mar 15 - 2023 New Jersey Elections: NJEA Spending Declines Significantly; 99% To Democrats
The Decline Implies Teachers Want Less Political Spending
The NJEA is New Jersey’s biggest special-interest political spender, but in 2023, its political spending declined to $3.45 million, down -57% from the 2017 peak and -28% from 2021. Over 99% went to Democrats.
Spending by the NJEA’s traditional PAC, NJEA PAC, continued its downward trajectory and was the lowest in over a decade. NJEA PAC is funded by a separate stream of dues that teachers must opt into, so the steady decline shows that when given a choice, teachers choose not to spend their money on politics.
Teachers don’t have a choice when it comes to funding the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, where spending also declined substantially. Garden State Forward reflects NJEA leadership’s discretionary spending, and the significant decline suggests a scenario: teachers are leaving the NJEA, dues revenues are declining, and leadership has been forced to focus on member retention rather than playing politics.
Both would imply that teachers want less political spending.
2023 Dec 11 - NJEA Leadership’s Scheme To Hide The Facts From Teachers
When teachers learn the facts about excessive executive compensation and political spending, many choose to leave the NJEA.
That’s why the Wayne Education Association is asking the state to force the Wayne School District to block Sunlight’s email campaign. Too many Wayne teachers were learning the facts about how NJEA leadership spends their highest-in-the-nation dues on excessive executive compensation and political spending and leaving the NJEA.
That’s why the NJEA created the “Member Protection Center” — aimed squarely at Sunlight — to “protect” teachers from these inconvenient facts.
That’s why NJEA leadership hides their one-percenter compensation, the highest in the nation by far.
And that’s why NJEA leadership hides the existence of the NJEA’ Super PAC, Garden State Forward, which has spent over $68 million of teachers’ regular dues on politics. Most teachers have no idea Garden State Forward exists, let alone that they are paying for it.
The NJEA knows that when teachers learn these facts, many decide they have better uses for the $1,500 in dues withheld from their paychecks every year. The NJEA’s self-serving actions don’t benefit teachers, who deserve to know the facts, they benefit NJEA leadership.
2023 Sep 26 - Post-Pandemic, Teachers Are Stretched And Stressed. Why Is NJEA Leadership Pushing Them To Fight The Culture Wars?
Against the vast majority of New Jersey citizens and parents, according to a recent Monmouth poll.
Post-pandemic learning loss and increased student misbehavior are making it harder for teachers to teach and causing many to leave the profession altogether. What is their union leadership, the NJEA leadership, doing about it? Nothing.
Rather than helping teachers teach, the NJEA is adding to their burdens by pushing teachers to fight local culture wars against the vast majority of citizens and parents across the state. When it comes to parental notification, the teaching of gender identity to grades 1-5, allowing gender-birth boys to play girls sports, and allowing bathroom use by gender identity, the Monmouth poll shows that NJEA-promoted policies are far out of step with the rest of New Jersey. And yet NJEA leadership is pushing teachers to becomes local advocates for these deeply unpopular policies.
All of this is being paid for by New Jersey teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues. Sunlight asks: how is it in teachers’ best interest for them and their dues to be used to fight the culture wars? It’s not. Yet teachers have no say in the matter. What a raw deal.
2023 Aug 17 - Conflict Of Interest: NJEA President Sean Spiller Uses Millions Of Teachers’ Dues For His Personal Political Career
NJEA President Sean Spiller has boundless political ambition. He’s run for office in Montclair since 2012 and is now reportedly eyeing a gubernatorial run in 2025.
Throughout Spiller’s personal political career in Montclair, the NJEA has been his largest supporter, primarily using the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward. Now Garden State Forward is spending millions on Spiller’s dark-money Super PAC “Protecting Our Democracy,” widely viewed as a platform for a Spiller run for governor in 2025.
Here’s the rub: Unlike the NJEA’s traditional PAC, NJEA PAC, Garden State Forward is funded by New Jersey teachers’ regular dues. Teachers have no say in the matter. NJEA leadership — including Spiller — simply appropriates their dues as they see fit. Most teachers don’t know they are funding Garden State Forward — or Spiller’s personal political career.
Herein lies another massive conflict of interest for Spiller: He has a duty to protect his members’ best interests, but is supporting Spiller’s personal political career in their best interests?
Don’t miss facts that come to light.