The joint advocacy of NJAEA and MCEA
By Dan Siegel and Drew Kazim
The year 2020 was an impactful and transformative one. When most people think about 2020, they immediately think of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic plays a small role in our story, 2020 marks a pivotal moment when the partnership between the New Jersey Aspiring Educators Association (NJAEA) and the Mercer County Education Association (MCEA) began to bloom and grow.
Current MCEA President Dan Siegel was just beginning a term as a vice president of MCEA. Many veteran teachers in Siegel’s school building had been retiring—some due to the devastating effects of the Chapter 78 legislation passed under Gov. Chris Christie and some due to it just being that time in their career. With this came an influx of younger teachers, many graduating from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) and Rider University, but districts also expanded their reach into Pennsylvania to hire new teachers.
edTPA complicates certification
Two newly hired teachers placed in Siegel’s building had graduated from colleges in Pennsylvania. One was a Pennsylvania resident. The other, a New Jersey resident, was coming back to her home district to teach. She even secured a leave replacement job in the same school where her sister was teaching.
As the 2019-20 school year progressed, these two teachers faced the prospect of not being able to return to their positions the following year. They were effective teachers and well-liked by their students and colleagues, but because they had been teacher preparation candidates in Pennsylvania, they had not been required to pass edTPA. New Jersey, however, had recently begun to require the performance-based assessment test to attain teacher certification.
Complicating matters, edTPA required video submissions of teaching practice that would include students. Some New Jersey school administrators were not comfortable with this requirement and prohibited teachers from recording students to fulfill their certification requirements. As a result, one of the new teachers in Siegel’s school made arrangements to record her edTPA videos in another school district, but with the shift to online learning at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, this never happened.
Because their path to certification was uncertain in the midst of the pandemic, these two teachers were eligible only to cover leave of absences over the next couple of years.
MCEA Legislative Action Team advocates with aspiring educators
While aspiring educators were struggling to meet the demands of edTPA, Heather Spiriko and Kimberly Cacciato, NJAEA officers at the time, began attending MCEA’s Legislative Action Team (LAT) meetings. MCEA had made a practice of including the NJAEA in its LAT and Representative Council meetings under past presidents, Grace Rarich and Christine Sampson-Clark.
Spiriko and Cacciato shared their edTPA stories:
- Their professors were taking instructional time out of their coursework to help coach their students on what they would need to do to pass the edTPA.
- All students in the videos needed consent from their parents to be filmed.
- Any loudspeaker announcements, fire drills or other interruptions could nullify the videos.
Spiriko and Cacciato noted that even if aspiring educators cleared all of these hurdles, someone scoring the edTPA portfolio could fail them. Consequently, the teacher candidate would have the “privilege” of paying hundreds of dollars to repeat the assessment, including new video recordings.
This could not stand. After hearing the student teachers’ stories and the stories from Siegel’s colleagues, former MCEA LAT Co-Chair and current Mercer County Retired Educators Association Vice President Lisa Rizziello brought the edTPA issue to the NJEA Government Relations (GR) Committee. NJEA went on to collect similar stories from aspiring and recently certified educators.
After nearly four years of working with legislators and Gov. Phil Murphy’s office, edTPA was eliminated as a state level certification requirement for teachers in New Jersey.
A pension partnership
The partnership between MCEA and NJAEA did not stop with edTPA. While the COVID-19 pandemic slowed things down for a while, MCEA and NJAEA kept up a strong partnership.
At the July 2023 NEA Representative Assembly in Orlando, MCEA “adopted” Bianca Nicolescu, the NJAEA delegate to the R.A., into their delegation. MCEA and NJAEA have also partnered in 2023 and 2024 to send a bus to the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City for aspiring, active and retired association members. NJAEA and MCEA members also are like-minded in helping their communities. Both organizations partnered at events to distribute backpacks and school supplies to students who needed them. Recently, Siegel and Rizziello attended an NJAEA Member Benefits fair at TCNJ.
The partnership between NJAEA and MCEA is only growing stronger. Recruitment and retention of educators has been a priority for all New Jersey public school stakeholders. To that end, NJAEA and MCEA members were among the many NJEA members who helped eliminate the redundant basic skills test requirement along the path to certification.
NJEA’s pension justice efforts over the last several years were, in part, born out of two early-career members speaking to Siegel about the lack of retirement security provided under the Tier 5 levels of the pension funds. Educators hired after June 28, 2011, are placed at a Tier 5 level in the Teachers’ Pension Annuity Fund (TPAF) or the Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS). This represents a considerable reduction in pension benefits, and the time it takes to earn them, compared to colleagues hired prior to June 2011. These two members had been active in NJAEA while aspiring educators. Meanwhile, NJAEA members provided firsthand stories of the impact Tier 5 has on college students deciding if a career in public education is right for them.
Siegel brought these concerns to the NJEA Pension Policy Committee and Rarich, and MCEA LAT Co-Chair Agueda Porras, brought these concerns to the GR Committee. With that, a movement was started to put everyone on Tier 1. It is no surprise that Mercer County legislators, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (LD-15), Assemblyman Anthony Verrelli (LD-15) and Sen. Linda Greenstein (LD-14) were the ones to introduce and sponsor the legislation to move all educators into Tier 1 because of their interactions with MCEA and NJAEA members.
A scholarship for student teaching
The latest endeavors for MCEA and NJAEA involve codifying student teacher stipends into law and pursuing mandatory liability insurance coverage for all New Jersey student teachers. For the 2024-25 academic year, the state budget provided student teachers with a $4,500 stipend for their completion of a full-time student teaching experience. Without legislation to make this practice permanent, as well as concerns about maintaining consistent dollar figures from year to year, interest was sparked to advocate for official legislation.
Recently, NJAEA officers President Bianca Nicolescu, Vice President Matthew Yuro and Secretary Chelsea Berwick, as well Drew Kazim (a co-author of this article) met with MCEA leaders and legislators to discuss the progress of the student teaching scholarship bill. Both MCEA and NJAEA leaders presented data demonstrating the decline in the number of teacher candidates in New Jersey and across the country, as well as an increase in teachers leaving the profession within five years of hire. They also highlighted how few teachers are pursuing certification in critical areas, such as World Languages. The legislators and legislative staff included LD 14 representatives Sen. Greenstein, Asw. Reynolds-Jackson and Asw. Tennille McCoy, as well as representatives from Asm. Verrelli’s office and the LD 16 offices of Asm. Roy Freiman and Asw. Mitchelle Drulis.
The aspiring educators highlighted the financial realities of being a student teacher, including transportation challenges and costs, material costs and the inability to work to earn enough income to pay their tuition bills while student teaching. Nicolescu and Yuro have collected countless testimonials from the NEA Aspiring Educators program and continue to spread the word that aspiring educators deserve compensation for their labor.
An award-winning partnership
MCEA was thrilled to receive the 2024-25 “Friends of Aspiring Educators” award in April during the joint NJEA Transform/NJAEA Conference. MCEA remains committed to partnering with NJAEA for the betterment of our profession, making the road smoother and more lucrative for our active members, aspiring members and new members who have yet to join us.
The collaboration of MCEA and NJAEA prove that there are aspiring educators willing to commit themselves to political advocacy, in addition to the support and dedication current educators have put into ensuring New Jersey remains one of the best K-12 education systems in the United States.
Dan Siegel, a teacher in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District, is the president of the Mercer County Education Association.
Drew Kazim is a student at The College of New Jersey where he majors in secondary education history. He is the chair for NJAEA Political Advocacy Committee.