Once again, kudos to the Star-Ledger editorial board for their hard-hitting editorial regarding NJEA President/Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller’s apparent retaliation against Sarah Avery, a Montclair citizen/activist who has been critical of Spiller.  Despite his legal troubles getting deeper and deeper, Spiller continues to use his members’ highest-in-the-nation dues to back his personal political ambitions.  The teachers don’t have a choice, but we wonder what they would think if they knew that the compromised and conflicted Spiller was spending their dues in this way. Sunlight covered ..read more

More reports of student misbehavior and the negative impact on teachers, with local association officers sounding the alarm.  Where is the NJEA on this issue of obvious importance to teachers?  Fighting the culture wars rather than protecting teachers. Thanks to NJEdReport, we learned the Asbury Park Press reported that Lakewood Education Association (LEA) officers are seeing teacher morale and safety “among the lowest levels ever.”  They claim teachers are being attacked by students with no consequences.  As a result, many teachers are leaving and staff turnover is high. T ..read more

Gov. Murphy spends a lot of time talking about how fiscally responsible he is, but as always with Murphy, you have to look through the words to the actual numbers.  An excellent example of that is Murphy’s FY2025 budget: it is not a fiscally responsible budget.  Now NJ Spotlight News reports that he is resorting to one-time fixes to pay for his unsustainable spending.   We’ve already noted that Murphy’s FY2025 budget increases spending by 3% to a record $55.9 billion, which is an astounding $21.2 billion — or 61% — higher than Gov. Christie’s last budget.  As the Sweeney Ce ..read more

Despite NJEA President Sean Spiller’s legal woes and his decision not to run for re-election as Montclair mayor, he’s still pursuing his (post-Montclair) personal political career and using hundreds of thousands of teachers’ dues to do it.  That’s the conclusion we draw from an InsiderNJ press release from Protecting Our Democracy, Spiller’s personal dark-money Super PAC.  The NJEA is Protecting Our Democracy’s founding donor, bankrolling a multi-million-dollar statewide campaign to ….. promote Spiller.  ALL of this is paid for by NJ teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues.  T ..read more

The president of the Bergen County Education Association, Sue McBride, penned an op-ed in the New Jersey Globe in defense of the NJEA against “editorials and anti-union propaganda,” meaning the Star-Ledger editorial board and Sunlight Policy Center, respectively.  We’ll let the Star-Ledger speak for itself, but McBride evades Sunlight’s main point: that teachers have been kept in the dark about the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward.  She says a lot about internal NJEA processes Sunlight has never criticized but does not even mention Garden State Forward.  Her intended audie ..read more

We wanted to add our quick take on Gov. Murphy’s proposed FY2025 budget.  In a sentence: it’s more spending backed by higher taxes, Murphy’s go-to governance formula, which always and everywhere takes care of his government union allies.  Here are the low-lights: Over his 7 budgets, Murphy has increased state government spending from $34.7 billion in Gov. Christie’s last budget to $55.9 billion, a jaw-dropping 61% increase.  It’s also a 3% increase over last year’s record budget despite lagging revenues. It is a structurally unbalanced budget and must dip into the state’s Rainy ..read more

InsiderNJ’s Fred Snowflack is back with his biased take on the culture wars in NJ school districts. The title of his recent piece “Hitting the Books, or Just Banning Them,” makes Snowflack’s bias plain for all to see.  It’s all about a “loud minority” banning books, not legitimate parental concerns about inappropriate content in their school libraries.  Snowflack once again flacks for Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman and his NJEA-funded NJ Public Education Coalition (NJPEC) — despite the fact that Gottesman is a proven liar.  Apparently so long as he takes pos ..read more

NJ appears to be heading into budget season with lagging revenues.  With state government spending up 56% under Gov. Murphy and a record $54.4 billion budget last year, lawmakers will be scrambling to make revenues match spending.  Either spending will have to be cut or taxes raised, or both, and the word in the press is that lawmakers are looking at raising taxes, as usual.  Raising taxes would hurt NJ citizens and taxpayers but benefit the deep-pocketed and politically powerful government unions, led by the NJEA. Who will win, the people or the special interests? NJ already ha ..read more

As we head into the final two years of Gov. Murphy’s tenure as governor, we must ask: what condition will NJ be in when he leaves office? A new report by the Sweeney Center paints a bleak picture.  All told, it forecasts that Murphy’s last state budget — for FY 2026 — will have a deficit of -$4.6 billion, which will completely wipe out NJ’s “rainy day” fund.  Thanks to the unsustainable trajectory of Murphy’s government spending, the next governor will inherit a budget where revenue falls well short of spending, resulting in a large deficit.  That’s called gubernatorial malpract ..read more

Will Gov. Murphy’s pals NJEA President/Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill receive the same treatment as the three Wildwood officials who were just indicted by Attorney General Platkin?  All the above availed themselves of full-time state health benefits under questionable circumstances.  But the big difference is that Spiller and Gill have very strong ties to our governor: under Spiller, the NJEA has spent $15.5 million supporting Murphy, $10.5 million of which went to New Direction New Jersey, the pro-Murphy Super PAC run by … Brendan Gill.   ..read more