Pioneer Institute in Boston recently issued an informative report criticizing Common Core's standards for the damage they have done to student achievement in this country and to the school choice movement.
The authors of this report — Ted Rebarber of Accountability Works and Neil McCluskey at the CATO Institute — urge a return not to the state's pre-Common Core standards but to the conditions that led to standards-based reforms — in the 1970s and 1980s. Rebarber and McCluskey don't quite say that, of course. They say: "We must shift standards-based reforms away from government central planners in order to disrupt the status quo and leverage innovative, ambitious curricula."
St. Anne's Shrine, a spectacular double-spired granite church in Fall River built by French-Canadians in the 1890s and early 1900s, closed Sunday with a final Mass celebrated by the bishop of the diocese.
The upstairs closed in 2015 because of failing plaster, and a recent study found it would take $13.5 million to fix the church. Bishop Edgar da Cunha decided to close it instead, saying the diocese has nowhere near enough money to make the needed repairs.
