Think tank to teachers: Leave NCAE, get a raise

The billboards are an escalation of years of push back against the North Carolina Association of Educators.

Posted 8:18 p.m. Sep 24, 2021 — Updated 12:14 a.m. Sep 25, 2021

Travis Fain

, WRAL statehouse reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — A right-leaning think tank stepped up its war of words with the state's largest teacher's group over the last few weeks, putting up billboards suggesting teachers leave the organization.

"Want a $500 raise?" ask the billboards, funded by the John Locke Foundation.

The idea is simple: Get teachers thinking about whether the North Carolina Association of Educators represents them well. Annual dues in the association, which is the closest thing to a teachers union in North Carolina, run about $500 a year, and a Sept. 30 deadline to opt out is approaching.

“No one here is concerned about the NCAE being involved in public debates, arguing on behalf of teachers," John Locke spokesman and senior policy analyst Mitch Kokai said Friday. "The reason for having this billboard campaign is that the NCAE seems to have gone beyond that and basically has just become a wing of the Democratic Party."

It's a frequent criticism for the group, which organized massive teacher rallies outside the General Assembly in recent years as the Republican majority wrestled with Gov. Roy Cooper and other Democrats over the state budget. Republican lawmakers repeatedly passed budgets with some raises for teachers, but Cooper vetoed them with support from the NCAE in an unsuccessful push for larger raises, more education funding in general and other budget priorities.

The largest of those priorities, by far, was Medicaid expansion, which would extend taxpayer-funded health insurance to hundreds of thousands of people in North Carolina, primarily the working poor.

The billboards went up in late August and early September. There's one along Capital Boulevard in Raleigh, and others are in Mecklenburg, Guilford and Johnston counties, Kokai said.

The NCAE declined to comment on the billboards, but it has pushed back against this kind of thing before. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly targeted the group, passing a law in 2012 meant to close off group's primary fundraising avenue: automatic dues withdrawals from teacher paychecks.

A judge struck that law down in 2013, and the following year, Republican legislators passed a law requiring teacher associations to have at least 40,000 members to do automatic withdrawals through the state payroll system. The bill also required the NCAE and other groups to report their membership numbers to the state, something NCAE has refused to do for years.

"[That's] presumably because any reliable count of membership would show the organization well below the 40,000-member threshold to authorize dues deduction," a John Locke writer said earlier this year, pointing to a separate count that put NCAE membership around 27,000.

The latest state auditor's report on this issue notes that the group wouldn't provide its membership numbers but says just under 6,000 teachers get automatic payroll deductions. A national survey in the 2017-18 school year indicated North Carolina has the lowest teacher union or association membership percentage in the country.

Kokai said the John Locke Foundation hasn't taken a step like putting up billboards before. But he said the Civitas Institute, a group John Locke merged with at the start of this year, has. Both groups were co-founded by Art Pope, a long-time Republican donor and budget director for former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

"We are in the business of educating people about public policy," Kokai said. "Part of this is a campaign to educate teachers. ... The main point is just to get teachers thinking about whether the NCAE is serving their interests."

WRAL Education Reporter Emily Walkenhorst contributed to this report.

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