USA Today Gets Played by Rightwing Education Lobby

USA Today reports this morning on the 65% Solution -- a disastrous rightwing policy that makes it easier for school districts to spend money on school vouchers than on school buses. Unfortunately, they also take rightwing spin at face value, writing:

The campaign, officially called First Class Education, is a quiet effort from Republican political consultant Tim Mooney and his pal Patrick Byrne, founder of the discount shopping website Overstock.com. [...] They came up with 65% by looking at the top-performing states on federal skills tests and saw that they spend, on average, a little over 64% of school operating budgets in the classroom; those at the bottom spend as little as 49%. "I was amazed nobody had gone down this alley," Byrne says.

As we've already reported here, Standard & Poor's did an independent evaluation and found no relationship between adherence to the 65% and school success. Because the goal of Mooney and Byrne isn't to improve schools. The goal is to attack public sector unions, funnel soft money into the electoral process, and lay the groundwork for vouchers. And you don't even have to take my word on that. Mooney and Byrne actually wrote a memo that lays out their real goals.