Teacher unions are taking heat from American voters who (according to this July 2022 poll) now trust Republicans more than Democrats to “handle issues related to schools and education, and “want schools to focus on helping students make up for lost ground” rather than focusing on race and gender. That’s a noteable turnaround: Democrats have historically been the go-to Party for education so you’d think this lost of faith would get union leaders’ attention.
Yet leaders at the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) haven’t gotten the message.
That’s one of the revelations from Mike Lilley’s new report from the Sunlight Policy Center. While Part I of “Teaching is Political” looks at NJEA’s program to train teachers to be lobbyists and politicians, Part 2 focuses on the union’s push to control who gets elected to school boards. The goal here is to maintain districts’ commitment to the “pro-education status quo,” which protects “future contract negotiations, working conditions, and current academic and administrative policies.” (Simultaneously, NJEA’s “Center for Honesty in Education” claims “political actors on the extreme right” are trying “to politicize our public schools.”
Lilley got his information by digging into the Center (which is part of a national effort by NJEA’s mothership, the National Education Association) and through access to “recordings of meetings conducted by NJEA staff and political organizers at school districts around the state.” Here’s what he learned (emphases his own):
The message is clear, says Lilley: “The NJEA wants itself and its local associations, not parents, to be in charge of local education policy.” He concludes,
By inserting itself into highly-charged district politics and in many cases fighting local parents attempting to assert their control over school boards, the NJEA is helping to turn schools into battlegrounds. Not even the kids are to be kept out of the fray. Rather than reducing the politicization, the NJEA is going all-in to increase it. This cannot be good for New Jersey schools, for the kids in them, for their parents or for the teachers who teach in the schools.
Once again, Sunlight is left to ask whether New Jersey teachers would choose to support such activities with their highest-in-the-nation, $999 NJEA annual dues. They don’t have a choice, but they do have to live with the consequences.
NJEA Is Teaching First Grade Teachers How to Perform ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’
This is a statement by Paula White, Executive Director of JerseyCAN, on the New Jersey…
This is a press release. Earlier today, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill to eliminate…
Today Gov. Phil Murphy signed Senate Bill 896, which prohibits the New Jersey Department of…
The 74 conducted a study of the relative learning loss in Democratic (Blue) and Republican (Red) states and…
In October 2020 Newark Superintendent Roger Leon announced with great fanfare the opening of district’s…
This is a press release from the Governor's Office. In related news, one in five…