MILWAUKEE--One lesson is clear from this city's decade-old experiment with school vouchers: A lot of people didn't know as much about schools as they thought they did.

Barbara Lee, a Catholic school principal, didn't know that two-thirds of her teaching staff would quit the first year her school accepted voucher students.

Edward Mc Milin, a public school bureaucrat, didn't know that, given choices, many parents would care more about day care than test scores. And Taki S. Raton, a private school principal, didn't know when he opened his academy that his first concern would be controlling gang fights, not teaching his cherished Afrocentric values.

All know better now. But what no one seems to know, in public or private schools, is a simple recipe for educating concentrated populations of poor children.

"We keep looking for a magic way to do this," said Lonnie J. Anderson, a public school principal. "There isn't one."

As Californians consider a November ballot initiative that would grant every child in the state a $4,000 voucher for private school, Milwaukee, home to the nation's largest publicly funded voucher program, offers this lesson: Urban education remains a tough job, even when schools compete.

In contrast to the California proposal, the Milwaukee program grants vouchers only to low-income parents. But it is one of the few examples nationwide of how publicly funded vouchers play out in reality.

Nationwide, the debate over school vouchers is steeped in ideology and passionately fought. Advocates tout the virtues of the free market and competition; opponents fear public school resources will be sapped and oppose mingling religious education and public money.

But in Milwaukee's classrooms--both public and private--ideology is drowned out every day by the realities of educating children who have fallen far behind, children without stable homes, children exposed to violent street culture, children who don't speak English, children with a parent in jail.

Some Parents Prefer Busing

Even public schools, far more familiar with this environment than the private ones, had some things to learn.

An example involves busing. Seventy percent of Milwaukee public school children ride a bus. Busing has long provided ammunition for voucher advocates, who argue that it shows that a district is poorly run.

But school officials have discovered that substantial numbers of parents actually prefer that their children be bused. When asked about busing, some parents admitted to using the long rides as a form of free day care. Long bus rides ensure that children are being supervised during the early morning and afternoon hours while parents work, they said.

In all the years busing has been an issue, "we had never delved into the reasons before," said Mc Milin, the Milwaukee school district's facilities planner.

Vouchers have made it possible for a share of Milwaukee's children to attend private schools their parents could not otherwise afford. But they have not succeeded in sprinkling poor students evenly among their wealthier private school peers, so voucher students tend to be concentrated. Half attend just one-fifth of participating private schools, according to the Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee research group. In at least 20 private schools, 90% or more of students receive vouchers.

The result is that some private and public school educators in Milwaukee's urban core have begun to sound awfully similar.

Private school principals here fret about discipline problems and teacher shortages. Public school principals refer to parents as "customers" and talk about consumer surveys. Both voice frustration at their schools' being constantly compared to suburban schools. Both say urban schools are too often judged by people who have never been in them.

Milwaukee is a city with a small-town feel despite its 600,000 residents. It is a city of smokestacks and steeples—a two-area-code, lakeside town of 19th century homes, tree-lined streets and majestic stone buildings. It's also a city of overgrown weeds, vacant lots and shuttered brick factories.

Blacks comprise about 40% of the population. The school system, though, is 62% black, and 83% minority--due partly to white flight, partly to the relative youth of the minority population.

Wisconsin's Parental Choice program was launched on an experimental basis in 1990 and later expanded to include religious schools. Though a state law, it affects only Milwaukee.

Today, about 11,000 low-income Milwaukee youngsters receive $5,326 from the state to attend private schools. The number enrolled has increased sharply since access to religious schools was granted three years ago. Students in the Parental Choice program still represent only about a tenth of the number of Milwaukee children attending public schools.

Several thousand vouchers go unused. Whether that is due to lack of space in private schools, eligibility problems or preference for public schools isn't clear. Surprisingly, overall private school enrollment in Milwaukee has declined slightly in the 10 years since the voucher program began.

The effects of vouchers on Milwaukee public schools are hotly debated. Achievement gains are difficult to gauge because the private schools are not required to test students. (California's voucher initiative, Proposition 38, would require private schools to administer the Stanford 9 test to voucher students.)

Although it's impossible to know how much vouchers have had to do with it, it's clear that Milwaukee's public school system is changing, attacking some of its problems and replicating its successes.

(See Part 2 of this article)