News that North Carolina ranks 42nd in per student spending provoked an amusing response from the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE).

The NCAE leadership accused the John Locke Foundation of “manipulating rankings, data, and studies.”  You may wonder, as I do, how reporting rankings, data, and studies produced by their parent organization, the National Education Association (NEA), qualifies as manipulation. Curiously, these complaints did not surface when the NCAE used the NEA study in question, Rankings and Estimates, to inform their “Fund Schools First” report.