Rhetoric Versus Reality : RAND Corporation : 9780833027658 : 0833027654 : 03 Dec 2001 : How can public schools be improved? One radical solution that has been proposed is to provide parents with a voucher for a specified dollar amount for use at any public or private school (both religious and non-religious). Proponents argue that those children using the voucher would be able to attend more effective and efficient private schools, and that the loss of students (and revenue) to public schools would force them to respond by improving their programmes. Everyone would then be better off.;In what has become a fiercely contentious and highly political debate opponents claim that moving to such a voucher system on a large scale would destroy public schools and exacerbate inequities in student outcomes by class and race/ethnicity. Both sides use research evidence from a small number of voucher experiments, and other sources, to bolster their claims. In this RAND Education book, the authors ta