Reading, Writing, Roulette
Offering parents questionable choices, Milwaukee's ten-year-old experiment with voucher schools may be gambling with poor children's education
By Robin D. Stone
Essence
9/00
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Brenda D. Gordon will be the first to admit she has made some pretty bad decisions in her 46 years: "Living a life without the Lord," as she calls it, for much of her youth. Trusting the instructor at her beauty school, who took her tuition and equipment but left her without a license or a viable way to earn an income. Falling into bed too soon with too many men.
Brenda is sitting in the crowded living room of her rented flat facing Milwaukee's major north-south freeway. The apartment is on the second floor of a muted brown house in a predominantly Black neighborhood just north of the heart of the city. She now has 11 children, eight of them by different daddies. "I started having kids when I was 19 years old," she says with a roll of her eyes and a shrug of her slender shoulders. "I graduated from high school and got on welfare. I had no booty control." You strain to hear her soft Tennessee twang over the traffic's din. The rumble outside is relentless, especially at this hour on a warm spring morning, as Brenda checks faces and bus fares, skirt hems and shirttails. It's her weekday ritual of preparing six of her kids to head off in pairs to three separate schools, each in different parts of town.
There's Fransau, 18, and ZsaZsa ("I wanted her to be a star," Brenda says), 16, both high-school students; Anastasia, 11, and Joe, 10, who go to the neighborhood school; Nefataria, 8, and Dempsey, 6, who attend a private school established by a Black church across town. Jacquilin, 5, and Shelbie, 3, won't enroll in school until September, but they join in this morning's commotion just the same. By sheer force of her own hand; Brenda explains, her three eldest kids--Antennile, 23, a bank teller; Rosalin, 25, a college student and phone-company employee; and son Kelly, 26, a computer operator--managed to transcend this neighborhood, which is still recovering from an epidemic of crack and crime. Brenda, a single mom who made the most of welfare and food stamps, got those three now-grown children into private schools by working there in exchange for tuition.
Brenda is now working two jobs, but she still pays close attention to her children's studies. She wants the mistakes of her past to end with her kids. "Their education means so much to me," she says. "I don't want people teaching my children how to be in a gang, how to be poor." Brenda today gets by on the night shift at UPS and a day job at the same McDonald's where Fransau and ZsaZsa work, plus child-support payments for one son. For the eight littlest ones still under her roof, she's striving to get the best that Milwaukee's schools have to offer.