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Members of the press and fellow Virginians:

Good morning. My name is . I am president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

This year, the Virginia General Assembly passed a $1.4B tax increase and spent most of it on public schools and public colleges and none of it on transportation.

My only question is, "Why?"

Public education has been lavishly funded. According to Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) statistics, Virginia state spending on public colleges has been increasing more than three times faster than enrollment, even after adjusting for inflation. The JLARC also reports that state inflation-adjusted spending on public schools has been increasing almost nine times faster than enrollment.

For transportation, however, the JLARC shows that spending barely kept up with population and lagged considerably behind the increase in vehicle-miles traveled. Fairfax County lost nearly 25 percent of its state funding for roads last May. None of our state income taxes is spent on transportation and almost none of our sales taxes is spent on transportation. Why does the education establishment get so much and transportation so little?

Schools say that they have more students with special needs. Often, however, special needs are the result of the public schools’ failure to teach properly. Specifically, learning-disabled children often are not learning disabled; they just haven’t been properly taught how to read and to do arithmetic. Public schools have no incentive to fix the problem, since the more special-needs students they have, the more taxes they can demand for mandated special-needs programs.

It was argued that state spending was needed for elementary school art, music, and physical education teachers. However, Fairfax County already had these teachers.

It was implied that higher state taxes would result in lower local taxes. However, Fairfax County just raised taxes.

It was argued that Virginia was 44^th in the nation in state spending for public schools. That was a half-truth. According to the Census Bureau, Virginia is 13^th in the nation in local-government spending for public schools, and 27th in the nation in overall public-school funding.

Who promoted these half-truths? It was the Virginia Education Association (VEA), which expends more energy on raising taxes than it does on raising achievement. The VEA’s indifference to student achievement is evident in its inaction regarding the minority student achievement gap.

So when the Virginia Education Association launched its all-out attack on Virginia taxpayers, why didn’t the General Assembly challenge the VEA’s misinformation? It is because the VEA, while it is an ineffective education organization, is a powerful political organization that politicians oppose at their peril. We expect better. We expect our legislators to courageously redress the structural imbalance between ineffective education spending and badly needed transportation spending. We expect our educators to raise achievement, not taxes. Public schools did not need more money; they need to fix their curriculum.

Thank you.

Updated October 3, 2004