A Mom Plans Her Escape

The value of an education was lost on Tonya Jordan until her children started school. When she was growing up in Milwaukee's inner city, she says, her parents didn't stress the importance of the classroom. Instead, the strict family edict for the six Jordan children was: "When you get 18, you had to get out of the house."

"All I did was live to turn 18," Jordan, now 35, says. "I graduated from high school and went to work."

While Jordan's friends went to college, she took a string of dead-end jobs and became the single mother of three children.

"I felt like a big dummy," she says candidly, sitting on the yellow-and-green sofa in her sparsely decorated Milwaukee home. "You get tired of being poverty- stricken. You get tired of the low-paying jobs. Finally, you think: 'Ding-dong, something is wrong.'

"You deprive yourself of life when you are not educated."

For Tonya Jordan, Milwaukee's voucher program has made the difference between having a choice for her girls and 'public school or nothing.'

It's those fundamental beliefs that drive Jordan to seek a better life for her three daughters. And it's that quest that led her to enroll her two eldest, Simone, 12, and Hanan, 10, in a private Muslim school last year using the Milwaukee voucher program. Her 3-year-old daughter, Abena, is in preschool.

More than 10,700 Milwaukee students use the publicly financed tuition vouchers to attend their families' choice of schools, including religious schools, while about 9,800 attend charter schools, which are public but operate independently.

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