Despite leading high-profile teacher rallies in Raleigh the last two years, the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) continues to lose members. The latest membership numbers, published earlier this week by veteran teacher union watcher Mike Antonucci, found NCAE had 28,725 total members in 2017-18, a decline of 6 percent from the previous year.
Over the past five years NCAE total membership has fallen 33.5 percent. How bad is the decline? The only other state to experience a greater percentage decline over the same time period was New Hampshire (47.4 percent).
Not all the news was bad. Total membership in the National Education Association, the parent affiliate of NCAE, is up slightly (.6 percent) over last year and up over the past five years but less so (.01 percent).
You can spend a lot of time parsing the results. Suffice it to say the membership results haven’t quite been the disaster that many teachers’ unions were expecting from the Janus decision.
Lastly, let’s not forget NCAE membership continues to fall well below the 40,000 threshold the legislature approved (G.S.143B-426.40(g)) to permit the state to provide dues payroll deduction services.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
