You can see why heroic stories about school reform have such a powerful appeal.

Energetic, idealistic individuals take on deadening bureaucracy and save poor kids from poverty and failure.

These are the stories Steven Brill tells in his new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, which I just finished reading and reviewing for the next issue of The Progressive.

Whether it's Teach For America or charter schools in Harlem, or tough, young school administrators who break the rules and develop more creative, intense curriculum for kids who are being neglected, there is an almost primal American story at the heart of school reform--about how individuals buck the system and through sheer grit and optimism, triumph, bring about change.

Here in Wisconsin, of course, we have been living through a different sort of narrative--about how civil society can be broken up and destroyed by powerful private interests, and about how we need to come together to defend our basic public institutions--especially the schools.

It was Brill's misfortune to finish writing his book just as things were heating up in Wisconsin, with mass protests of the governor's attack on public employees' right to bargain--especially teachers. As a result, much of the familiar school reform narrative--in which teachers' unions are the bad guys, rooting out bad teachers is an intense preoccupation, and breaking up public school systems is the answer--seems strangely ill-timed, if not downright tacky.

The whole country--progressives and Democrats in particular--are much more in tune these days with how we need to defend public education and our teachers than with how we need to shake things up.

But it's not just Republicans who are susceptible to that other narrative.

Especially on the Left, there is a fine old tradition of attacking the Establishment, authority, the system.

When it comes to school reform, African-American parents who are disgusted with schools that systematically discriminate against their kids have a particularly compelling tale to tell.

Here in Madison, just as Scott Walker was lighting a fire under the entire community to defend its public schools, another local figure was galvanizing support for an all-boys, African American charter school, Madison Prep--http://www.madison-prep.org/, that would operate outside the regular school district, employ non-union teachers, draw substantial funds out of the public school system, and enroll students whom its founder says had been treated very badly by the city's white establishment.

The author of the Madison Prep idea, Urban League president Kaleem Caire, is a very persuasive, dynamic public speaker and a passionate advocate for kids--especially African American boys.

He may soon be overseeing a Waiting For Superman-type public lottery, where parents hold their breath, and react with joy and despair, while they find out whether or not they get into the school.

Opponents of Madison Prep point out that, thanks in part to Wisconsin's massive budget cuts for education, siphoning tens of millions of dollars in school district funds into an independent, all-boys charter school that starts with just 60 kids could mean painful cuts to programs that serve the other 24,000 students in the district.

I spent a lot of time recently talking to people on both sides of this issue, and found both the school board member who raised the biggest cost concerns, Ed Hughes, and Kaleem Caire quite compelling.

In the next few weeks, Madison will decide whether to go ahead and spend the money Caire is asking for. So far the discussion has focused mainly on Caire himself and his compelling personal story. (It helps that he is charismatic, energetic, and a fun person to talk to).

But, as Ed Hughes point out, the bigger picture in our community is that schools are facing some ugly budget realities in the coming years, and there are cheaper and possibly even more effective alternatives. (One local charter school that works within the district, Badger Rock, will cost the district $6 million over the next five years, versus the $27 million the most recent draft of the Madison Prep proposal says it will cost).

At bottom, the school question is a question about community itself.

"Years ago, our schools were our community," Caire says. "Life happened around them." He and his family felt that way about their school in Maryland, Kingsford Elementary, Caire says, where there was a very high poverty rate, but a big majority of the students tested proficient or advanced.

Coming back to Madison, where he grew up, Caire encountered a city with a huge poverty rate among African Americans and Latinos, and a highly segregated public life--very few African American businesses, practically no black middle class.

Giving black kids here a sense of community and caring and high expectations is what Madison Prep is all about.

When you listen to him talk about it, you can't help but get caught up in his enthusiasm. Longer school days, a longer school year, teachers of color who can relate to and want to inspire and motivate their students, a rigorous curriculum, a high level of community engagement . . . it all sounds great.

"That doesn't sound like any other school in the district, does it?" Caire asked me.

Well, leaving aside the uniforms and the single-sex academy (the state recently insisted the Urban League open a girls' school, too, to pass constitutional muster), I was struck by the opposite.

That feeling of community is exactly what the parents and teachers and kids at my kids' public schools have. It is what motivated a lot of the marches and the outpouring of public sentiment against Scott Walker's attack on teacher's unions last spring.

I once listened to the head of the Madison Metropolitan School District, Dan Nerad, speak to a group of parents in my neighborhood, dealing cautiously with the emotional topic of people pulling their kids out of what they perceive as a less desirable public school here. "What's at stake here," Nerad said, "is community itself."

"I would be interested to see if black and Latino families feel part of the community," Caire told me.

Because low-income kids are bussed all over the city, and because low-income, Section 8 housing is spread in small pockets around town, and poor people in our city move around a lot, there are many reasons for people to feel left out.

A charter school that creates that sense of community, and that communal determination to help kids succeed, is a powerful idea in this environment.

Maybe it will work.

Maybe, like earlier charter and voucher school stories that sounded wonderful but ultimately flopped, it will be an expensive mistake.

Here's a point of consensus, though. Steve Brill, Kaleem Caire, and Ed Hughes all agree on one thing: Ultimately the whole community has to be engaged to make anything meaningful happen for kids.

By the end of "Class Warfare," Brill reluctantly concedes that teachers' unions must be partners in education reform. After watching one of his star, heroic young teachers burn out teaching at a charter school in Harlem, he decides that individuals who are willing to work crazy hours and kill themselves to help kids cannot do it alone. There has to be a system, through the unions, of creating a sustainable work environment, and there has to be a whole public school structure, to make good education available to more kids.

Caire, for his part, says, "Ultimately we want the school to be replicated in the public education domain. That's the whole idea."

And Hughes readily agrees with Caire that the district has not done enough for students of color.

"If not Madison Prep, what?" Caire demands. "You guys had no plan before I got here. I came with a plan--a tight plan. Now what?"

"That's the question, isn't it," says Hughes. If Madison nixes the Urban League's charter school, "we need to have some sort of alternative proposal we think will be a better way to address the issue."

He thinks some of Caire's great ideas could be done more cheaply within the existing school system and then replicated if they work.

The debate about this one charter school in Madison, Wisconsin, makes it pretty clear that if we are going to have a good system of public education for everyone, sooner or later we are going to have to drop the heroic, individual approach and work together.

If you liked this article by Ruth Conniff, the political editor of The Progressive, check out her story "David Brooks Sticks Up for the Super-Rich ."

Follow Ruth Conniff @rconniff on Twitter