Posted on by Californiacontrarian

The New Normal ?

I moved to Southern California over forty years ago, and this winter has been the coldest that I can recall since I have lived here. Granted I do not claim to have a perfect memory, but I asked my neighbor who is in his forties what he thought. He agreed with me, and since he was born and raised here, I have to ask, “Is this the new normal?” While I know that daily/weekly variations in temperature are not supposed to have any relationship to Global Warming, I ponder whether or not this is what is what those that know best are referring to as Climate Change. Of course, if getting colder here in SoCal is indicative of the climate actually changing, I am struggling to relate this to CO2.

Be that as it may, today I read about another “new normal” in New York.

state where they are lowering cutoff scores for standardized tests due to ‘learning loss’ from COVID lockdowns.

From BlazeNews:

New York state will lower its threshold for what is considered to be “proficient” on its standardized tests to account for a loss of learning in students from 2019 to 2022, according to reporting by the Daily Caller.

The state’s scoring committee will being using data from 2022 as the benchmark for student scoring, despite standardized scores in subjects such as math proficiency dropping by 7.6 points compared to 2019, according to Spectrum News.

“Only a quarter of students in the 8th grade, which is the latest grade that we have test scores for, were able to be proficient in math,” said David Bloomfield, professor of education leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

“That’s really worrisome,” he added.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight … because school children did not learn what they were supposed to learn as a consequence of government mandated school closures in New York, New York is going to lower their standards of achievement on testing. Are they doing this so that the children will not feel bad when their test scores are poor? I guess in New York, rather than trying to increase what the children are learning, it is more important that children feel good about themselves! If they ultimately do not learn as much, it might work out if the future new normal is that New Yorkers are only competing against other New Yorkers for future jobs. However, children of New York, a warning … “do not attempt to get future jobs on merit if you are competing against children from red states, such as Florida, because then the new normal will be that you will definitely feel bad about yourselves.”

3/23/23

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