Crawl Naked Over Broken Glass by Lawrence Cromwell

What do you get when a high school science teacher gets fed up with the son of a used car salesman who runs a dog fighting ring and has a very dark secret in his past?
Teacher Doug Henderson is the new chemistry and algebra teacher at a small town high school and he's gotten himself into real trouble. He has come to the town of Walton to escape a broken marriage and a vengeful ex-wife. Now, at his new school, he encounters the same problem with rude, disinterested, and disruptive students that he had in his old school.
Fed up with the behavior of a few of his chemistry students and the failure of the administrators to punish them, he decides to force them to change their ways by tricking the worst of them into cheating on a test. When they fall for his trap, he gives them all failing grades, but this creates problems with his Principal and Brad Cantell, the father of one of those students. Brad is also the owner of the only used car lot and is running a dog fighting ring, and has a dark secret in his past.
When Brad attempts to get even with Doug by threatening the most important individual in his life, Doug realizes that he has to make dramatic changes in his timid, self-deprecating lifestyle. He will be forced to leap into unfamiliar territory and make irrevocable changes in the way he earns a living, all while building his relationship with the woman he is falling in love with. Along the way, he is forced to challenge the whole idea of American Public Education. To survive, he must find a way to get his students to voluntarily take responsibility for their own education so that they are willing to make any sacrifice to learn; even to crawl naked over broken glass to reach their goals.