Misconduct

Misconduct is a memoir about education, power, and the personal cost of refusing to stay quiet.

A high school dropout who earned his GED at sixteen, Rob Duren later returned to education as a student leader, teacher, administrator, and scholar, eventually earning a doctorate in education. Over two decades, he worked across K-12 schools, alternative programs, higher education, correctional facilities, and adult education, often serving students pushed to the margins of the system.

Misconduct traces that journey across deserts, swamps, cities, and small towns, examining how institutions define success, enforce compliance, and punish dissent. Through personal narrative and professional reckoning, the book explores belonging and rebellion, ambition and burnout, and what happens when integrity collides with systems that reward silence.

This is not a manifesto or a tell-all. It is a measured, reflective account of one educator's path through the promises and failures of American education, and a meditation on what it costs to tell the truth inside institutions built to protect themselves.