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About T.L. Zempel
Author
TerryLynn Zempel
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I'm a former Colorado public school teacher. I'm also a former Oakland, CA, Catholic school teacher. Now, I am a New Mexico teacher. I've had a long and mostly rewarding career, but I've experienced some faulty and flawed practices that detract from a teacher's mission: teaching.
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I wrote my books to share my experiences with education practices that stem from performance-based teacher evaluation schemes. These policies encourage fraud and add multiple layers of bureaucracy in public education. But do they do anything for students?
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My first book, Finishing School, was written in 2014
and 2015 to share the changes in Colorado public
school teacher evaluation as a result of the passage
of Colorado SB 10-191 in 2011. I developed the book
as a novel because I wanted to explore the
possibilities of what could happen when idiotic ideas
spin out of control. But 90% of this book comes
directly from factual policies and occurrances,
and it is available now on Amazon.​​
Released in 2022 on Amazon is my second book, Chaos in Our Schools, which tells the entire true story and should be taken seriously by all stakeholders in education: politicians, taxpayers, parents, researchers, administrators, and teachers. It shares the policies that were rolled out in my Colorado school district between 2012 and 2018 as a result of Senate Bill 10-191, along with my own research on the Visible Learning fad, Differentiation, Common Core, and standardized testing.