Activities
The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals is considered one of the most active political groups in the state of Rhode Island. It sued to oppose the shut-down of Rhode Island state government during a budget crisis in 1991, fought to keep full-time union leaders (who were former public employees) in the state pension system, worked to enact strong constraints on charter schools in the state's charter school law (the resulting law is one of the most restrictive in the nation as of 2004), supported stronger and clearer curriculum standards, sued to stop the state from penalizing retired public employees who were enrolled in more expensive health care plans, opposed binding arbitration for teacher union contracts, opposed merit pay, fought reductions in retiree pensions, and sought to limit the role of school-wide committees in establishing teacher assignments, class sizes and layoff rules.
A significant network of unionized teachers interested in applying new union structures and models to creating high-quality schools, part of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), is also active within RIFTHP. There have been some media reports that this network has had an influence on RIFTHP, and that the state federation is more willing to embrace some union and school reform efforts. In 2006, RIFTHP and the NEA affiliate in Rhode Island issued a joint report which focused on poverty and its many negative effects on children (such a malnutrition, unstable or violent home situations, lack of access to books and educational items like crayons or paper, and little access to high-quality early childhood programs) as key issues in the school reform effort. The report dismissed criticism that collective bargaining agreements stymied reform, and pressed for higher spending on early-childhood programs, reductions in class size, and improving teacher training programs. In 2009, the state federation began a push to have local school boards adopt much more rigorous teacher evaluation standards as well as stronger mentoring program. The state of Rhode Island approved the plan for adoption by local school boards, and RIFTHP won a $200,000 national competitive grant to help fund the first four programs (to be implemented in Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket).
Read more about this topic: Rhode Island Federation Of Teachers And Health Professionals
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)