Milwaukee school system at center of voucher debate.

Byline: Linda K. Wertheimer

MILWAUKEE _ Teachers at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School fume about a new after-school duty: making banners to woo students who use public dollars to attend private schools.

Franklin, housed in a nondescript red brick building in West Milwaukee, has lost 100 students in the last few years. The inner-city public school is scrambling to fill 17 openings in its new full-day pre-kindergarten class, created to compete with the offerings at private schools.

A dozen blocks away, inside another red brick building, the Marva Collins Preparatory School of Wisconsin has 150 students on a waiting list. About 85 percent of the private school's students use vouchers. To principal Robert Rauh, the beauty of vouchers is the choice they give poor parents.

In this city of breweries with a Great Lake on its border, one of the thorniest education issues in the presidential campaign has been playing itself out for a decade. Milwaukee is home to every angle of the voucher debate between presidential contenders George W. Bush and Al Gore.

"There doesn't seem to be any middle ground politically on this," said Charles Toulmin, a Wisconsin education official who oversees the state's voucher program. "Either you're completely for it, and you want hardly any state oversight, or you're completely against it and you don't want the program to exist."

Bush, the Republican candidate, while he does not use the word "vouchers," proposes giving students at low-performing public schools up to $1,500 per year in tuition to transfer to any…