When It Comes to Serving the Best Interests of Teachers, NJEA President Steve Beatty Is All Talk and No Action. Will He Ever Tell the Truth About the Spiller Scandal?

NJEA President Steve Beatty marked the start of a new school year by taking to the pages of NJ.com. His op-ed stressed that the success of New Jersey’s public school system depends on teachers, nurses, custodians, and all the personnel that staff the schools — most of whom are NJEA members. That’s true enough: these educators and support personnel are essential for schools to function and children to learn. Beatty then goes on to highlight some key challenges NJEA members face but neglects to mention the NJEA’s own role in perpetuating and adding to these challenges. Words are cheap. Actions count. Beatty’s words are not matched by action.

Beatty talks about pensions but he dropped the ball on improving them. In his op-ed, Beatty rightly points out that teachers are legitimately concerned about their pensions: “… too many school employees are concerned about retirement security after decades of service.” It is absolutely true that over half of current teachers are stuck in inadequate Tier 5 pensions with no COLA. But Beatty neglects to mention that NJEA leadership dropped the ball on improving pensions. By turning the entire organization into one, big Spiller-for-Governor Super PAC, NJEA leadership — including then-Vice President Beatty — prioritized Spiller over pensions and thereby doomed the campaign to improve pensions. It is hypocritical of Beatty to highlight teachers’ pension concerns after having de-prioritized them in favor of Spiller’s run.

Beatty talks about the financial burdens on teachers but jacked up dues again. Likewise, Beatty points out the increasing financial burdens being placed on teachers: “The answer is not asking working people to carry a heavier burden.” Higher healthcare costs and inflation are certainly eating into teachers’ paychecks. But so are NJEA dues! President Beatty just oversaw another 3.9% increase in NJEA dues to $1,171 a year. As they have been for many years, NJEA dues are the highest in the nation by far: 30% higher than California and over twice as much as Massachusetts. They are up 12.8% over the past three years. The total dues burden (including NEA, county, and local dues) now averages $1,652 a year. That is surely eating into paychecks — especially for a new teacher making $58,000 a year. In a fair world, after squandering $45 million of teachers’ dues on Spiller’s run without their knowledge or consent, Beatty and leadership might have given teachers a break on dues, but in the real-world of the NJEA, dues are jacked up even higher. Beatty wants to talk about financial burdens but not do what is within his power to alleviate them.

Beatty played a key role in the Spiller scandal. Beatty says it’s all about “the people” working in public schools, but when it comes to actually serving their best interests, Beatty is again all talk and no action. Recall that Beatty was NJEA vice president for every year that Sean Spiller was president. That means he was the second-highest elected official in the organization and actively involved in all the major decisions undertaken during those years. That means he was actively involved in the Spiller scandal, when NJEA leadership wasted $45 million of teachers’ dues on Spiller’s long-shot, vanity run for governor while hiding the truth from teachers. Recall that Spiller finished a distant fifth, spending over $500 of dues per vote.

And helped hide the truth from teachers. We have irrefutable proof that Beatty was actively involved in the scheme to hide the truth about Spiller’s run from teachers. As Sunlight noted at the time, after much prodding from Sunlight, the Star-Ledger, and Politico, Beatty effectively admitted — if you read between his evasive lines — that NJEA leadership had funded Spiller’s run with $45 million of teachers’ dues. But, crucially, Beatty’s roundabout admission was in an op-ed in a relatively obscure, on-line news site, New Jersey Globe. It’s clear the op-ed was aimed at the press and Trenton insiders who read the Globe, not teachers. If Beatty had wanted teachers to know the truth, he would have told them directly in one of the NJEA’s main interfaces with teachers: the NJEA website or Facebook page. Unlike his recent NJ.com op-ed, Beatty’s Globe op-ed was not published on the NJEA’s Facebook page. Nor was it published on the NJEA’s website. Beatty’s sly underhandedness shows he was actively involved in hiding the truth about Spiller’s run from teachers. Further supporting this conclusion, as president, Beatty has never come clean about the Spiller scandal. To this day, he has never admitted directly to teachers that $45 million of their dues were covertly diverted to back Spiller.

So don’t take Beatty’s NJ.com op-ed seriously. The facts show that when it comes to serving teachers’ best interests, Beatty is all talk and no action.