Washington
I promised you yesterday that I’d get the most recent membership numbers for the National Education Association, and NEA’s press staff helpfully provided them. So here we go.
Last year, despite reporting an increase, the union actually lost about 9,000 members. Now, for 2015-16, it is reporting an increase of about 34,000 members. (Teacher Beat aside: I don’t think the union was trying to pull a fast one in 2014-15. Because a lot of teachers retire in the summer, it might have taken a while for better data to come in.)
These numbers are actual members across the different categories (retirees, part-timers, students, teachers, and paraprofessionals), not full-time equivalents.