Other Loyalties: The Life of a School and the Education of a Teacher Paperback - 2022

From the publisher

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 . . .

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.