Today, Sen. Ralph Hise went out of his way to release a statement trying to frame NCAE as an organization that does not actually have a large membership and the best interests of the teaching profession in mind.

In fact, he claimed that NCAE only represented a little over 5% of teachers in North Carolina.

Of course Hise’s press release has a quote from Hise:

“The NCAE, which represents just 5% of teachers, is fighting tooth and nail to keep the other 95% of teachers from getting a pay raise.”

What Hise was referring to was a report from the State Auditor’s office (Beth Wood) about membership in organizations that allow for automatic deductions for membership dues.

It has this data table:

First, the idea that Hise is trumpeting a report about finances and honest reporting of political organization is rather funny. And ironic. Consider this:

Add to that, Hise is a statistician by trade. He should know numbers and he is deliberately misleading in his statement about NCAE’s membership. The very report he “quotes” tells us that. Look again.

Only one group on that list has a membership that fully pays through payroll deductions. In fact, at least two of the groups have memberships that are ten times the amount of people who use payroll deduction. Any statistician would know better than to misrepresent the numbers in a statement (unless he did it for political purposes).

There are two other teacher advocacy groups on that list whose memberships are mostly represented by people who do not use payroll deduction. PENC has 4.59 times the total number of members as their payroll deduction members. The NCCTA has 16.39 times the total number of members.

If NCAE followed those trends (and it does), it could might have a membership of at least 24,744.

That’s a pretty big number. What would that look like? Something like this:

If it had the same ratio as NCCTA, then that number would be around 88,000.

Wow! Probably not that much, but….

If Hise is going to deliberately make the claim that NCAE only represents 5% of all teachers when the report suggests otherwise, then it probably means a few things:

1. He’s a really bad statistician.
2. He doesn’t read reports from auditors well.
3. He’s making an extremely bad partisan jab at NCAE.
4. He’s actually scared of what happens when teachers organize.
5. He knows that he and his cronies are not as powerful as they used to be.

OR…

All the above.

Oh, and don’t think that when Rep. Rick Horner repeated the claim on his Facebook account that it went unnoticed.