Other Loyalties

When was the last time you fell in love with a school?

This is the tale of a public charter school on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, led by a charismatic and footloose principal, Ms. D. For six glorious years, it was a place where teachers were saints and raunchy renegades, gentle guides, and heroes of the republic.

At a time when Americans are losing trust in schools and teachers, this book attempts to answer the question: What do we hope for in a teacher? 

Ms. D's little school was a rule-bending place that may not have been for everyone, but in this compelling memoir, a young teacher finds it's where he belonged. As he tells the tale of those years, the teacher is forced to deal with a shadowy power struggle, one that would end up destroying the school he loved so much, and leaving him wondering what exactly he's writing . . .

A love letter to teaching? Or a goodbye to teaching?

Neutrality might be increasingly rare in an America split between hard right and hard left. But the teachers at Ms. D's little charter school remained sane by finding non-political loyalties-to friendship, nature, fun, and a spirit of adventure. For a tight-knit group of middle school students, who would soon be suffocated by waves of technology and ideology, this made common ground easy to define: it consisted of the dirt trails they hiked on together as they followed their teachers into the unknown.