Madison - The agreement that opens the door to expansion of Milwaukee's private school voucher program cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday and appears on track for approval in the state Assembly and Senate by the end of next week.

But the 6-2 vote of the Assembly's education reform committee came only after 5½ hours of sharply divided testimony and amid strong signs that the majority of Democrats, including most of Milwaukee's representatives, will vote no.

All six Republicans on the committee voted in favor; two Democrats voted no; a third Democrat, Chris Sinicki from Milwaukee, supports the agreement but was not present due to illness. Rep. Annette Polly Williams (D-Milwaukee), who authored the legislation that created the voucher program in 1990, was one of the two who voted no.

The Senate's education committee also took part in the hearing and is expected to vote by paper ballot today, with a 4 to 3 vote in favor of the agreement likely. The committee has four Republicans and three Democrats.

The agreement between Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican Assembly Speaker John Gard calls for raising the legal limit on the number of students who can use vouchers to attend private schools in Milwaukee to 22,500 from the current level of about 15,000.

It also calls for an increase in funding of the statewide SAGE program to reduce class sizes for low-income kindergarten through third-graders - a Doyle priority - and requires private schools in the program to become accredited and to take other steps aimed at providing more public accountability for how vouchers are being used.

But even though the agreement was brokered by arguably the two most powerful people in the Capitol and is almost sure to pass, the conflicts and passions underlying the debate about Milwaukee's education problems in general and the voucher program in particular were vividly on display at Wednesday's session.

Both Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and a leading voucher advocate, and Dennis Oulahan, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, came close to tears as they testified.

For Fuller, the immediate cause was comments from state Sen. Robert Jauch (D-Poplar) about the high quality of MPS' Golda Meir School for gifted and talented students.

Fuller said the history of how African-Americans in the city were treated needs to be remembered. He told how he attended that school when it was 4th Street School, and nothing was done to help poor black families raise its quality. It was only when it was designated for gifted students, and white children enrolled, that it became a school parents would choose, Fuller said.

For Oulahan, the immediate cause was the state of society - record oil company profits at a time when children go hungry - and the state of life for many Milwaukee children and in Milwaukee neighborhoods he compared to Beirut. "There are things that are really out of whack here," he said.

He called the voucher program a distraction from the real issues of the city and said, "Why can't we get about the business of changing the way life is in the city of Milwaukee?"

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett urged the legislators to add to the package property tax help for Milwaukee.