[VTDuffman]

Students in private schools tend to do better because parents who make more money (and thus can afford to send their kids to private schools) tend to be more intelligent and sucessful. They are already at a genetic advantage.

If you take a dumb kid and put him in a private school, he's not going to magically get smart because the schools are so great, he's just going to be a dumb kid. If you take a smart kid and put him in a public school, he's not going to get dumb.

The problem with the notion of vouchers is that if you allow exemptions for people who put their kids in private schools, you have to allow exemptions for everyone not utilizing the public school system. I don't have any kids, why do my property taxes pay for the education of others? Etc.

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The vast majority of private-school students actually have less than half as much funding behind them as public-school students.

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Also, if this is an example of the conclusions comming out of a "think tank," then it's a crappy think tank. This is a fallacious assumption because it is comparing how much a public school *spends* per student and how much a private school *charges* per student. The fundmental flaw is that it assumes that the only way that private schools recieve funding is from tuition, which we all know is not true. They are spending much more per student than what they are charging in tuition.

I keep finding more problems when I read this:

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recruit high-performing students, and expel low-performing students.

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They don't dispel this notion. This happens in private schools all the time. And to boot, they are arguing against the fact that public schools currently are "penniless." But I don't think that's what the counter-argument is: the counter argument is that it would render public schools penniless.

I gotta be honest. There's logical fallacies all over the place here, this think tank kind of sucks.