MILWAUKEE (CNN) -- Eleven-year-old Anteria Wright is a fifth-grader at Riley Elementary on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"I know my mama wants me to be a straight 'A' student," Anteria says. "I know that I can do it and I know that I will do it one day."

Across town, 11-year-old Robert Smith is a fifth-grader at Marva Collins Prep on the city's north side.

"When I grow up, I'll have an education and be able to get a good job," Robert says, "and I might even own my own business."

Anteria and Robert are on the front line of the hottest battle in American education: vouchers.

Wright attends a public school and Smith receives a $5,000 voucher from the state to go to private school.

While America's politicians and pundits ponder the larger questions, "Are vouchers the way to fix a system many say is broken?" and "Is the cure worse than the disease?," Smith and Wright live this debate every day.

'Someone has to try to make a difference'

Robert begins his morning at around 5 a.m., dressing in his uniform of the day — red tie, white shirt, blue trousers.

While his uniform may be consistent, simple and stable, Robert's young life has hardly been so. Since the age of four, he's been bounced around from foster home to foster home.

But these days he's happy with his permanent address and his adoptive mother, 57-year-old Dorothy Smith.

Dorothy is a single mother with seven young children. Her biological children have all grown up and left the house. The seven youngsters who live with her now are her adopted and foster children, Robert and six others, ages six through 11.

"Someone has to try to make a difference in these children's [lives]," Smith says. "They need some stability. They need love. They're just like any of us. They just want somebody to say that they care."

Three years ago, Smith took a car ride that would change Robert's life. While out driving one day, Smith heard a radio commercial for a brand-new private school called Marva Collins Prep.

"I did a U-turn right in the middle of the street and went over to the school and got an application from Mr. Rauh," Smith explains.

But only with vouchers could Smith afford the $5,300-a-year per-student tuition Robert and two of his siblings need to attend Marva Collins Prep.

"I had the opportunity to get them in private school," Smith says. "I jumped at the choice, and I have been very, very satisfied with the progress they've made. They still have a long way to go, but they have come a long ways in three years."

'It wasn't what I thought it would be'

Over on the south side of town, Anteria's morning begins a little later than Robert's.

"I wake up at 6:30," Anteria explains. "I put on my clothes, and then I eat breakfast, and then my mom, sometimes she does my hair."

Anteria's mother, 29-year-old LaDonna Wright, also has to get her other two children, Anteria's younger sister Didriana and older brother Cruz, off to school.

Three years ago, Wright and her husband sent Anteria and Cruz to a private school that accepted vouchers. But the Wrights pulled the children out one year later because, they say, Anteria and Cruz had fallen behind their public school friends in almost every subject.

"I was disappointed, you know. I was expecting more than he was getting," Wright says. "I thought, oh private school, you know, maybe this is the best thing. But then, when I ... put them in private, it wasn't what I thought it would be [or] should be."

The Wrights are happy with Anteria's new public school, Riley Elementary, a success story in an otherwise troubled system.

'All children deserve the best'

With 100,000 students, the Milwaukee Public School district is a big-city system long plagued by big-city problems: poverty, poor discipline and violence.

A decade ago, when the voucher battle began, the dropout rate in the Milwaukee schools was among the highest in the country; the average GPA was a D plus; and almost 20 percent of all high school students were suspended at least once during the year.

At that time, the district had become more than 50 percent minority, and African-American parents in particular were clamoring for a way out for their children.

"What I'm fighting for is that no matter what the color, what the income, all children deserve the best," proclaims Annette "Polly" Williams, a 20-year veteran of the Wisconsin House of Representatives and the leader of Milwaukee's groundbreaking movement for educational choice.

In the early 1970s, Williams was a single parent on welfare struggling to raise four children. Unsatisfied with the city's public schools, Williams scrimped, saved and borrowed from friends and relatives to send all of her kids to private school.

"I received help at a critical time in my life for my children. You know, if that support was not there ... I just wonder where would my children be now?" Williams ponders.

In 1989, Williams began crusading for legislation she hoped would give her constituents the resources to do for their kids what she had done for hers.

Williams explains: "We just said, if the state was going to pay for the miseducation of children in the public schools, surely they would not object to paying a small portion to allow parents then to pick a school outside of the public schools."

Under the plan, money would be made available to low-income Milwaukee families in the form of checks from the state called "vouchers." Parents could apply these vouchers toward tuition at any Milwaukee private school that would accept them. The checks would be sent directly to the schools and the parents would simply endorse them.

The plan appealed to two groups usually on opposite sides of the fence: urban minorities and conservative Republicans.

"If someone would have told me that I would ever form an alliance with conservatives, Republicans and corporate America, I would say, 'Uh-huh. No way,'" Williams explains, adding "And here I was in alliance with people I'd never had any dealings with before."

Opponents of the voucher proposal said Williams, a Democrat, was being used to put a black face on a right-wing scheme to destroy public education. Vouchers, the critics claimed, were simply a way of funneling public money to private schools.

But with the support of Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, Williams held her coalition together. In March 1990, Thompson signed The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the first modern-day program in the U.S. providing public vouchers for private schools, into law.

In the ten years since the law took effect, the MPCP has grown to include 8,000 students and cost $40 million a year. But it has never stopped being controversial.