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1. Overview 2. Teacher Directions 3. Student Directions 4. Materials for Students

a. Stimulus Set of Textsb. Support Scaffolds, such as note-

taking templatesc. Research Responses

5. Materials for Teachers a. Materials for Entry Eventb. Scoring Rubricsc. Standards and Task

Specifications6. Appendix: Print-friendly texts

Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts

Performance Task: The Moral Dilemma of Human Rights Advocacy

Essential Question: To what extent should individuals, agencies, or governments from other nations involve themselves in human rights advocacy across the globe?

Through this Performance Task, students build on their study of literary texts to explore appropriate responses to actions that the international community recognizes as human rights violations. Integrating their prior knowledge of multiple texts with current research in the field of human rights advocacy, students demonstrate their Common Core Reading and Writing skills through research and argument response.

OverviewThe Moral Dilemma of Human Rights Advocacy

Task Overview This performance task is made up of a culminating activity & assessment that require students to research human rights violations through the lens of various academic sources. The two tasks integrate multiple literary works taken from the WCPSS English II curriculum and synthesize these texts with current research to encourage students to apply prior knowledge while utilizing skills from the ELA Common Core. Essential Questions: Should individuals, agencies, or governments from other nations involve themselves in human rights advocacy across the globe? How has my study of literary texts influenced my understating of human rights violations and the advocacy necessary to encourage and promote the end to such abuses?

Suggested parallel course texts: Night, Elie Weisel; All But My Life, Gerda Weissmann Klein; The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini; The Middle of Everywhere, Mary Pipher

Entry Event Classroom Activity Using visual stimuli (chart and photo), the teacher invites students to share prior knowledge of human rights violations based on their studies. By way of class discussion, and in

Scorable Products Student responses to the constructed-response research questions at the end of Part 1 and the argumentative report completed in Part 2 will be scored. Notes completed in Part 1 and pre-writing and

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts order to contextualize the examination of stimuli in Part 1, students are reminded of two basic understandings about human rights: 1) that violations have occurred throughout history all over the globe and 2) that responses to ending violations vary depending on the context in which they take place.

drafting in Part 2 will not be scored.

Student Task: Part 1 Students examine and take notes on the stimuli, a series of sources that present various perspectives on human rights violations and suggested responses to ending them. Constructed-response questions call upon the students to summarize and evaluate the presented sources.

Student Task: Part 2 Students refer to their notes as needed to compose a full-length argumentative report. Students are allowed access to the stimuli they examined in Part 1. Pre-writing, drafting, and revisions are involved.

Teacher DirectionsEntry Event Classroom Activity (20 minutes) Present on a projector (or distribute a handout of) the image of Holocaust victims being

liberated from Buchenwald, April 1945 (see attached). After giving students a moment to look at the image, ask, “What do you think this

photograph is about?” After time for multiple responses, follow with probing question: “Based on our studies this semester, what do you know about the Holocaust and genocide?”

After taking multiple responses, affirm or state that the image was taken during the liberation of a concentration camp in Germany. One of the individuals in the picture they may have even studied this year: Elie Wiesel, author of the memoir Night.

Invite students to briefly discuss what they remember from their Holocaust studies. Some may even have looked at human rights violations, specifically genocide, in other texts they have read for the course. Remind students that human rights violations aren’t merely limited to genocide, violations occur on a spectrum of intensities and have taken place (and still are) all over the globe. Take some time to brainstorm these other texts and violations.

After students have recalled prior knowledge via this initial discussion, have them examine the next visual, an organizer that maps out what human rights violations consist of (see attached).

Ask students to fill out their own individual chart then share with a partner. Once sufficient time has been provided for them to brainstorm on their map, students should then be prompted to share as a whole class. Fill in a model map for the students as they synthesize their ideas. Use the example organizer to help guide their conversation if necessary (see attached).

Say to the students, “In the performance task that you are going to participate in today, you will learn more about human rights advocacy and the debate over the extent to which aid and interventions are offered to victims. Eventually, you will need to take a position on what the beginning level of response prevention adopted by the United States should be

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts to such a situation? It is important to know that, as our studies this semester have indicated, genocide has occurred and continues to happen with various levels of response. Human rights advocates don’t always agree on the best form of foreign aid to offer to potential human rights victims, particularly considering the diversity of interventions and the very culturally and politically specific environments these violations occur within.”

Part 1 (60 minutes)Students should receive the sources, directions, questions, report assignment, and any other material related to the task. They should receive the constructed-response questions in Part 1 and the report assignment in Part 2.

1. Initiate the research session.2. Pass out the note-taking guide, reminding the students that its use is optional and unscored.3. Alert the students when there are 25 minutes remaining in class.4. Alert the students when there are 5 minutes remaining in class.5. Have students write their names on any notes. Collect all student notes.6. Close the research session.

Part 2 (One 90 minute class period)

1. Initiate the Performance Task Part 2.2. Allow students to access the sources, their notes, and their answers to the constructed-response questions presented in Part 1. They will not be allowed to change their answers.3. Once 15 minutes have elapsed, suggest students begin writing the report.4. Alert the students when 30 minutes remain.5. Alert students when 15 minutes remain and suggest they begin revising their reports.6. Close the testing session.

Student DirectionsPart 1 Handout

Your TaskYou will conduct research on the pros and cons of the United States interjecting in the affairs of another country under the impression that human rights violations are occurring as a result of the direct efforts or negligence of its governing body. Once you have reviewed the sources provided, then you will write a report arguing your opinion on the initial level of response the United States is obligated to take when dealing with human rights violations, supporting your conclusion for that plan of action from the research you have conducted. You have 55 minutes to complete this task.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Steps to FollowIn order to plan and compose your report, you will do all of the following:1. Review and evaluate the sources provided on the pros and cons of your topic.2. Make notes about the information from the sources.3. Answer two questions about the sources.

Directions for BeginningYou are currently holding the position of Student Activist Coordinator (SAC) with the human rights organization Amnesty International (AI).Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members, and activists in over 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights. Your organization’s vision is for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. As an SAC for AI, you operate independently of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion, and are funded mainly by memberships and public donationsPart of your job as an SAC is to work with your Senior Director on campaign opportunities and policy-related issues; act as a liaison between AI groups, staff and other volunteer leaders; promote area-wide initiatives; and act as a spokesperson for AI where appropriate.Recently, your Senior Director has challenged you to work on the “Write for Rights” campaign: an initiative that promotes activism on the high school level and encourages young students to write letters to their local, state, and national representatives concerning America’s stance on intervening in human rights violations abroad.As the leader of this initiative at your local high school, you need to be knowledgeable and informed on issues relating to human rights and the broad level of responses, outcomes, and challenges that relate to activism abroad—particularly when providing humanitarian aid to victims. Your senior director has encouraged you to research your subject matter in order to be best prepared for leading the “Write for Rights” event at your school.Back in your office, you enter “humanitarian aid” into a Google search engine, and it returns what looks like a promising mix of articles, videos, and first-hand accounts. You must review and evaluate these sources and summarize their arguments about human rights violations and aid—both pro and con—before reporting back to your senior director about your findings.You have been provided with and are encouraged to use a note-taking guide that will help you gather and process your findings.

Research QuestionsAfter you have reviewed the sources, answer the questions below. Your answers to these questions will be scored. Also, they will help you think about the sources you have read and viewed, which should help you write your report. Answer the questions in the spaces

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts provided below each question.Question 1:From the sources you have reviewed, summarize 3 major arguments that support and 3 major arguments that oppose possible interventions adopted by the United States when addressing human rights violations in another country. For each of the arguments, cite at least one source that supports that point of view.

To begin, you should consider:Based upon the sources provided, what appears to be the crux of the debate influencing a country’s level of response to reacting against human rights violations in another country? Based upon the issue, what are the arguments in favor of an aggressive versus more cautious intervention strategy?

Question 2.Evaluate the credibility of the arguments and evidence presented by these sources. Which of the sources are more trustworthy and why? Which of the sources warrant some skepticism because of bias or insufficient evidence?

Part 2 HandoutFor this part, you will now have 80 minutes. You may use your notes and refer to the sources. You may also refer to the answers you wrote to the questions in Part 1, but you cannot change those answers. Now read your assignment and the information about how your report will be scored; then begin your work.

Your AssignmentBack in the Senior Director’s office, you start to hand him your notes on the pros and cons of humanitarian aid, but he waves away your papers.

“Part of being an effective SAC is trusting in your research and using your voice to advocate for people who may lack one,” he says.

“The ‘Write for Rights’ campaign is powerful because it offers an honest voice on human rights from the young people who represent AI’s future. Instead of sharing your thoughts with me, go ahead and write your own letter advocating for your point of view on our nation’s stance on foreign intervention and aid. Should the United States always be aggressive in our approach to responding to human rights violations or should our approach to aid be more discreet? Be sure that your recommendation acknowledges both sides of the issue so that your fellow students and politicians know that we have considered the issue carefully. I’ll review your letter tonight and use it for the kick-off of our campaign at your school tomorrow morning.”

Write an argumentative report that recommends the position that you believe your representatives should take on humanitarian outreach and aid in areas where violations are occurring. Support your claim with evidence from the sources you have read and viewed. You do not need to use all the sources, only the ones that most effectively and credibly support your position and your consideration of the opposing point of view.

Your Question:If the government of a developing country is about to begin, or has begun, a systematic program of human rights violations against its people or a group within their population, which of the following should be the United States’ beginning level of response prevention

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts to such a situation?

Begin a diplomatic program of interventions such as initiating discussions with existing governing leaders and bodies about violations.

Begin steps toward military action such as sending ground forces or starting aerial assaults to suppress perpetrators.

Begin monitoring the conflict, but remain neutral until the international community decides to promote a plan to intercede.

Use contemporary research on human rights and humanitarian aid to support your assertion. Well formulated arguments will consider all sides of the debate when reaching a preferred level of response.

Response GuidelinesYour report will be scored on the following criteria:

1. Statement of purpose / focus and organization: How well did you clearly state your claim on the topic, maintain your focus, and address the alternate and opposing claims? How well did your ideas logically flow from the introduction to conclusion using effective transitions? How well did you stay on topic throughout the report?2. Elaboration of evidence: How well did you elaborate your arguments and discussion of counterarguments, citing evidence from your sources? How well did you effectively express ideas using precise language and vocabulary that were appropriate for the audience and purpose of your report?3. Conventions: How well did you follow the rules of usage, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling?

To Begin Work:Manage your time carefully so that you can:

• plan your report• write your report• revise and edit for a final draft

Word-processing tools and spell check are available to you. Type your response in the space provided. Write as much as you need to fulfill the requirements of the task; you are not limited by the size of the response area on the screen.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Materials for Students

Notes on Materials for Students and Potential Additions

Sources for the task have been intentionally selected to cover a range of perspectives on the humanitarian aid debate.

Listed in the chart below are titles and links to a suggested grouping of texts that can be provided to students to research and answer the question they have been challenged with. The sources include memoirs, documents, speeches, news articles, and interviews. These sources have been drawn from a range of scholarly and news outlets in order to cover a spectrum of perspectives. This will enable students to not only see a variety of opinions on their topic, but also specific biases on the subject.

If sources in the selected grouping of texts do not meet an educator’s needs, excerpts from WCPSS approved English II texts may be substituted. It may be enriching for students to be able to supplement their research with texts they may be familiar with from their studies. Suggestions for supplemental referencing could include excerpts from:

Night, Elie Weisel; All But My Life, Gerda Weissmann Klein; The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini; The Middle of Everywhere, Mary Pipher

Provided in the chart below are links to each source. In an appendix to this document, each has been excerpted and formatted for ease of implementation. Some sources have been explained with a brief introduction to increase student comprehension.

Stimuli Set of TextsA Long Way

Gonehttp://

www.alongwaygone.com/media/

ALongWayGone_Excerpt.pdf

There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land.

Anti Humanitarian

Aid

http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/10/anti-humanitarian-aid

Aid to Africa remains a favorite cause for politicians and entertainers. From Geldoff to Bono to Blair, everyone wants credit for attacking poverty.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Acceptance

Speech

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/

laureates/1986/wiesel-acceptance_en.html

It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends me. This both frightens and pleases me.

The Case Against Aid

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/12/

the_worlds_humanitarian_aid_organizations_may_do_more_harm_than_good_argues_linda_pol

man/?page=full

In 1859, a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant took a business trip to Italy, where he happened upon the aftermath of a particularly bloody battle in the Austro-Sardinian War.

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Universal Declaration of Human

Rights

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

We Meant Well

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/

WeMeantWelExcerpt.pdf

The reconstruction of Iraq was the largest nation- building program in history, dwarfing in cost, size, and complexity even those undertaken after World War II to rebuild Germany and Japan.

Student Note-taking GuideResearc

h Published By

Argument for Aggressive

Argument Against Aggressive

How reliable is evidence from

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Source Intervention Intervention this source

Research Responses: Scorable Products

Question 1: From the sources you have reviewed, summarize 3 major arguments that support and 3 major arguments that oppose possible interventions adopted by the United States when addressing human rights violations in another country. For each of the arguments, cite at least one source that supports that point of view.

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To begin, you should consider:Based upon the sources provided, what appears to be the crux of the debate influencing a country’s level of response to reacting against human rights violations in another country? Based upon the issue, what are the arguments in favor of an aggressive versus more cautious intervention strategy?

Argument / Fact in Favor of aggressive interventions

Source Supporting This Argument

1.

2.

3.

Argument/Fact in Opposition to aggressive interventions

Source Supporting This Argument

1.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts 2.

3.

Question 2: Evaluate the credibility of the arguments and evidence presented by these sources. Which of the sources are more trustworthy and why? Which of the sources warrant some skepticism because of bias or insufficient evidence? Complete a full response.

Materials for Teachers

Notes on Materials for Entry Event/Class Discussion

Provided in the chart below are links for educators to help with the implementation of this performance task, as well as suggestions to resources that could enrich student mastery.Included in this chart are the links to the entry activity materials, as well as connections to two full length documentaries that could be viewed in their entirety or excerpted in the classroom. These non-print texts could be used as an entry to frame the performance task for students or as a concluding activity. Also linked below are the addresses for Amnesty International and the Write for Rights page. These could be explored for background by teachers, provide invaluable resources for the study of human rights, and/or serve as a gateway for turning the task into a larger project based unit as the educator sees fit.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Title Link Important to Know

Visual I: Holocaust Survivors During the Liberation of Buchenwald, 1945

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/

en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10007176&

MediaId=4052

This image be substituted with another, or shown with various iconic photographs

Visual II: A Model of Diagrammatic Mapping for Human Rights

http://www.amnesty.nl/sites/default/files/

public/mapping_for_human_ri

ghts.pdf

Please note the teacher copy provided below to insure students are exposed to a complete and thorough chart.

The Devil Comes on Horseback

Film Site:http://

www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com/

YouTube Link:https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BJOfpJ8qVE

This 2007 documentary about genocide in Sudan can provide students with background in advocating for human rights intervention and the difficulties/realities of such work. It may provide a great opportunity for teachers to model the thought process of the task before its actual implementation.

Worse Than War

PBS Site:http://www.pbs.org/

wnet/worse-than-war/

Film Link:http://www.pbs.org/

wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/watch-worse-

than-war/24/

This PBS initiative includes many helpful resources for the study of genocide over time periods and cultures. Linked here is the site, as well as the full length documentary that has been described by critics as is the first documentary to step back and focus on the general phenomenon of genocide – offering viewers profound insights into its dimensions, patterns and causes, and tragic role in politics and human affairs.

Amnesty Internationalhttp://

www.amnesty.org/Use this site for helpful resources on human rights advocacy, as well as current events.

Write for Rights

http://www.amnestyusa.org/

writeforrights/

This site provides real world context for the performance task prompt and could also serve as a resource for expanding the task into a project based unit.

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http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/

http://www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com/



http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10007176&MediaId=4052



Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Materials for Entry Event/Class Discussion

Visual I: Holocaust Survivors During the Liberation of Buchenwald, 1945

Taken from the USHMM: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10007176&MediaId=4052

Visual II: A Model of Diagrammatic Mapping for Human Right

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Types of Violation/

Abuse

Sustainers

Places of Violence

Victims

Constraints

ResourcesInterven-tions

Causes

Methods

Perpetra-tors


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Adapted from Amnesty International: http://www.amnesty.nl/sites/default/files/public/mapping_for_human_rights.pdf

Teacher Key: A Model of Diagrammatic Mapping for Human Rights:Violations / Abuses• Domestic violence• Sexual violence• Economic disempowerment• Political domination• DisinheritanceSustainers• Communities• Family members• Traditional leaders &institutions• Local administration• Religious leaders• Incompetent legislators• Law enforcement officers

Places of Violence• Homes• Work places• Government offices• Conflict hit areas• Detention centers• Learning institutions• Villages

Methods• Beatings• Rape & defilement• Killings• Disinheritance• Denial of an education• Forced marriages• Forced involvement in armedconflicts• Harassment of women rightsdefenders• Low wages and forced labor

Constraints• Lack of financial resources• Ingrained cultural and religiousbeliefs• Lack of political will• Sexualization of issues• Abject poverty

Interventions• Persistent awareness creation• Economic and political empowerment & participation• Strengthening of legal frameworks• Engendering of traditional and local institutions• Prosecution of cases

Resources/opportunities available• Local resource centers• Active local/national/regional human rightsorganizations• Supportive mass media• Trained human rights defenders• Strong voices of local

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http://www.amnesty.nl/sites/default/files/public/mapping_for_human_rights.pdf

Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts • Exposure through mass media• Strengthening of local women’s rights groups• Intensifying lobbying and advocacy

activists (male and female)• Local/national/regional force for lobbying and advocacy• Legislation guaranteeing women’s rights

Causes• Cultural beliefs• Religious beliefs• Lack of education andawareness• Gender inequality• Lack of access to land anddisinheritance• High unemployment• Dysfunctional legal system• Breakdown of social valuesand order

Victims• Women• Girl child• Boy child• General community• The economy

Perpetrators• Family members• Neighbors• Community leaders• Law enforcement officers• Government officials• Criminals• Militia gangs• Insensitive government• Guardians

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts SCORING INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH QUESTIONSQuestion 1: From the sources you have reviewed, summarize 3 major arguments that support and 3 major arguments that oppose possible interventions adopted by the United States when addressing human rights violations in another country. For each of the arguments, cite at least one source that supports that point of view.To begin, you should consider:Based upon the sources provided, what appears to be the crux of the debate influencing a country’s level of response to reacting against human rights violations in another country? Based upon the issue, what are the arguments in favor of an aggressive versus more cautious intervention strategy?

2 Point RubricUsing Evidence (CCSS RI.7, RI.8, W.7, W.9)

2 The response gives sufficient evidence of the student’s ability to cite evidence to support arguments and/or ideas.

1 The response gives limited evidence of the student’s ability to cite evidence to support arguments and/or ideas.

0 The response receives no credit if it provides no evidence of the student’s ability to cite evidence to support arguments and/or ideas.

Adapted from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium Grade 11 Performance Task, http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/performance-tasks/nuclear.pdf

Question 2: Evaluate the credibility of the arguments and evidence presented by these sources. Which of the sources are more trustworthy and why? Which of the sources warrant some skepticism because of bias or insufficient evidence?

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http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/performance-tasks/nuclear.pdf

Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts 2 Point Rubric

Evaluating Sources and Information (CCSS RI.8, W.8)

2 The response gives sufficient evidence of the student’s ability to evaluate the credibility, completeness, relevancy, and/or accuracy of the information and sources.

1 The response gives limited evidence of the student’s ability to evaluate the credibility, completeness, relevancy, and/or accuracy of the information and sources.

0 The response receives no credit if it provides no evidence of the student’s ability to evaluate the credibility, completeness, relevancy, and/or accuracy of the information and sources..


SCORING INFORMATION FOR ARGUMENT RESPONSEFull-Response AssignmentWrite an argumentative report that recommends the position that you believe your representatives should take on humanitarian outreach and aid in areas where human rights violations are occurring. Support your claim with evidence from the sources you have read and viewed. You do not need to use all the sources, only the ones that most effectively and credibly support your position and your consideration of the opposing point of view.

Support your claim with evidence from the sources you have read and viewed. You do not need to use all the sources, only the ones that most effectively and credibly support your position and your consideration of the opposing point of view.

Report Scoring Your report will be scored on the following criteria: 1. Statement of purpose / focus and organization: How well did you clearly state your claim on the topic, maintain your focus, and address the alternate and opposing claims? How well did your ideas logically flow from the introduction to conclusion using effective transitions? How well did you stay on topic throughout the report? 2. Elaboration of evidence: How well did you elaborate your arguments and discussion of counterarguments, citing evidence from your sources? How well did you effectively express ideas using precise language and vocabulary that were appropriate for the audience and purpose of your report? 3. Conventions: How well did you follow the rules of usage, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling?

2- Point Argumentative Full Response Aligned to and


Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Conventions

2 1 NSThe response demonstrates an adequate command of conventions: errors in usage and sentence

formation may be present, but no systematic pattern of errors is displayed and meaning is not obscured

adequate use of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling

The response demonstrates a partial command of conventions: errors in usage may obscure

meaning inconsistent use of punctuation,

capitalization

Insufficient, illegible, in a language other than English, incoherent, off-topic, or off-purpose writing

4-Point Argumentative Full Response

4 3 2 1 NS

Stat

emen

t of

Pur

pose

The response is fully sustained and consistently and purposefully focused: claim is clearly

stated, focused, and strongly maintained

alternate or opposing claims are clearly addressed

claim is introduced and communicated clearly within the purpose, audience, and task

The response is adequately sustained and generally focused: claim is clear and

mostly maintained, though some loosely related material may be present

context provided for the claim is adequate within the purpose, audience, and task

The response is somewhat sustained and may have a minor drift in focus: may be clearly

focused on the claim but is insufficiently sustained, or

claim on the issue may be somewhat unclear and/or unfocused

The response may be related to the purpose but may provide little or no focus: may be very

brief may have a

major drift claim may be

confusing or ambiguous


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Focu

s an

d O

rgan

izat

ion

The response has a clear and effective organizational structure creating a sense of unity and completeness: consistent use of a

variety of transitional strategies to clarify the relationships between and among ideas

logical progression of ideas from beginning to end

effective introduction and conclusion for intended audience and purpose

strong connections among ideas, with some syntactic variety

The response has an evident organizational structure and a sense of completeness, though there may be minor flaws and some ideas may be loosely connected: adequate use of

transitional strategies with some variety to clarify the relationships between and among ideas

adequate progression of ideas from beginning to end

adequate introduction and conclusion

adequate, if slightly inconsistent, connection among ideas

The response has an inconsistent organizational structure, and flaws are evident: inconsistent use

of transitional strategies and/or little variety

uneven progression of ideas from beginning to end

conclusion and introduction, if present, are weak

weak connection among ideas

The response has little or no discernible organizational structure: few or no

transitional strategies are evident

frequent extraneous ideas may intrude


Evid

ence

and

Ela

bora

tion

The response provides thorough and convincing support/evidence for the writer’s claim that includes the effective use of sources, facts, and details. The response achieves substantial depth that is specific and relevant: use of evidence

from sources is integrated, comprehensive, relevant, and concrete

effective use of a variety of elaborative techniques

The response provides adequate support/evidence for the writer’s claim that includes the use of sources, facts, and details. The response achieves some depth and specificity but is predominantly general: some evidence

from sources is included, though citations may be general or imprecise

adequate use of some elaborative techniques

The response provides uneven, cursory support/evidence for the writer’s claim that includes partial or uneven use of sources, facts, and details. The response achieves little depth: evidence from

sources is weakly integrated, and citations, if present, are uneven

weak or uneven use of elaborative techniques

The response provides minimal support/evi-dence for the writer’s claim that includes little or no use of sources, facts, and details: Use of

evidence from sources is minimal, absent, incorrect, or irrelevant


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Effec

t on

Aud

ienc

eThe response clearly and effectively expresses ideas, using precise language: use of academic

and domain-specific vocabulary is clearly appropriate for the audience and purpose

The response adequately expresses ideas, employing a mix of precise with more general language: use of domain-

specific vocabulary is generally appropriate for the audience and purpose

The response expresses ideas unevenly, using simplistic language: use of domain-

specific vocabulary may at times be inappropriate for the audience and purpose

The response’s expression of ideas is vague, lacks clarity, or is confusing: uses limited

language or domain-specific vocabulary

may have little sense of audience and purpose



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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Task Specifications

Key Common Core Standards AssessedRI.1—Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the textRI.7—Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.RI. 8—Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.RI.9—Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.RI.10—Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently._____________________________________________

W. 1—Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.W.4—Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.W.7—Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.W.8—Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.W.9—Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.Additional Common Core Standards Assessed

Claim(s):

o Students can read closely and analytically to comprehend a range of increasingly complex literacy and informational texts.

o Students can produce effective and well-grounded writing for a range of purposes and audiences.

o Students can employ effective speaking and listening skills for a range of purposes and audiences.

o Students can engage in research/inquiry to investigate topics, and to analyze, integrate, and present information.

Primary Claims and

Targets:

These claims and targets will be measured by scorable evidence collected.

Students are being asked to COMPOSE FULL TEXTS: write full persuasive pieces/arguments about topics or texts, attending to purpose and audience: establishing and supporting a claim, organizing and citing supporting evidence (from texts when appropriate) from credible sources, and providing a conclusion appropriate to purpose and audience.

Students are being asked to consider LANGUAGE & VOCABULARY USE: strategically use precise language and vocabulary (including academic and domain-specific vocabulary and figurative language) and style appropriate to the purpose and audience when revising or composing texts.

Students are being asked to EDIT/CLARIFY: apply or edit grade-appropriate grammar, usage, and mechanics to clarify a message and edit narrative, informational, and persuasive/argument texts.

Students are being asked to ANALYZE/INTEGRATE INFORMATION: Gather, analyze, and integrate multiple sources of information/evidence to support a presentation on a topic.

Students are being asked to EVALUATE INFORMATION/SOURCES: consider

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts relevancy, accuracy, and completeness of information from multiple sources.

Students are being asked to USE EVIDENCE: cite evidence to support arguments or conjectures.

DOK: 4Total Possible Score Points:

Up to 10

Possible Adjustments for Students with IEPs or

504s

Decrease the number of sources provided to students Incorporate documentary footage provided in the chart of

supplementary texts to model and frame the debate of the PT

Possible Adjustments for Students

with LEPs

Provide students with pre and post reading questions regarding the text.

Use graphic organizers to outline response Limit text set based on lexile

Possible Adjustments

for Honors, AP, or IB Students

Allow students to select their own sources. Turn the PT into a PBL unit where student are forced to create a

persuasive call to action based on their research Extend the PT by encouraging students to participate in the Write to

Right campaign and begin the initiative at their school

Stimuli:

Flesch Kincaid Grade Level

Quantitative Level of Text Complexity:Flesch Kincaid Readability

1. A Long Way Gone 6.4 78.92. Anti Humanitarian Aid 11.6 46.43. Elie Wiesel Nobel Speech 6.8 69.44. The Case Against Aid 8.4 64.15. Universal Declaration of Human Rights 11.3 45.16. We Meant Well 10.8 56.6

How this Task contributes to

sufficient evidence for

the claims:

In order to complete the performance task, students1. Evaluate and select information from a series of sources2. Write an argumentative report effectively demonstrating

• a clearly-established claim about the topic• presentation of relevant supporting evidence, details, and elaboration consistent with the position, sources, purpose, and audience• effective organization of ideas• adherence to conventions and rules of grammar, usage, and mechanics• control of language for purpose and audience

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Appendix: Student Sources (Print Friendly)

A Long Way Gone Background: Ishmael Beah was just barely a teenager when his town became engulfed in Sierra Leone's civil war in the mid-1990s. In his 2007 memoir, A Long Way Gone, Beah describes how, after he lost his parents and brothers to the conflict, he wandered the countryside with a band of boys and was recruited as a child soldier by government forces. The memoir describes the hellish atrocities committed by child soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The following is the first chapter of his memoir.

Chapter One

There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it washappening in a faraway and different land. It wasn’t until refugees started passing throughour town that we began to see that it was actually taking place in our country. Familieswho had walked hundreds of miles told how relatives had been killed and their housesburned. Some people felt sorry for them and offered them places to stay, but most of therefugees refused, because they said the war would eventually reach our town. Thechildren of these families wouldn’t look at us, and they jumped at the sound of choppingwood or as stones landed on the tin roofs flung by children hunting birds with slingshots.The adults among these children from the war zones would be lost in their thoughtsduring conversations with the elders of my town. Apart from their fatigue andmalnourishment, it was evident they had seen something that plagued their minds,something that we would refuse to accept if they told us all of it. At times I thought thatsome of the stories the passersby told were exaggerated. The only wars I knew of werethose that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, andthe one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news. My imaginationat ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness ofthe refugees.

The first time that I was touched by war I was twelve. It was in January of 1993. I lefthome with Junior, my older brother, and our friend Talloi, both a year older than I, to goto the town of Mattru Jong, to participate in our friends’ talent show. Mohamed, my bestfriend, couldn’t come because he and his father were renovating their thatched-roofkitchen that day. The four of us had started a rap and dance group when I was eight. Wewere first introduced to rap music during one of our visits to Mobimbi, a quarter wherethe foreigners who worked for the same American company as my father lived. We oftenwent to Mobimbi to swim in a pool and watch the huge color television and the whitepeople who crowded the visitors’ recreational area. One evening a music video thatconsisted of a bunch of young black fellows talking really fast came on the television.The four of us sat there mesmerized by the song, trying to understand what the blackfellows were saying. At the end of the video, some letters came up at the bottom of thescreen. They read “Sugarhill Gang, ‘Rapper’s Delight.’” Junior quickly wrote it down ona piece of paper. After that, we came to the quarters every other weekend to study thatkind of music on television. We didn’t know what it was called then, but I was impressed

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts with the fact that the black fellows knew how to speak English really fast, and to the beat.

Later on, when Junior went to secondary school, he befriended some boys whotaught him more about foreign music and dance. During holidays, he brought mecassettes and taught my friends and me how to dance to what we came to know as hiphop.I loved the dance, and particularly enjoyed learning the lyrics, because they werepoetic and it improved my vocabulary. One afternoon, Father came home while Junior,Mohamed, Talloi, and I were learning the verse of “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B. &Rakim. He stood by the door of our clay brick and tin roof house laughing and thenasked, “Can you even understand what you are saying?” He left before Junior couldanswer. He sat in a hammock under the shade of the mango, guava, and orange trees andtuned his radio to the BBC news.

“Now, this is good English, the kind that you should be listening to,” he shoutedfrom the yard.

While Father listened to the news, Junior taught us how to move our feet to thebeat. We alternately moved our right and then our left feet to the front and back, andsimultaneously did the same with our arms, shaking our upper bodies and heads. “Thismove is called the running man,” Junior said. Afterward, we would practice miming therap songs we had memorized. Before we parted to carry out our various evening choresof fetching water and cleaning lamps, we would say “Peace, son” or “I’m out,” phraseswe had picked up from the rap lyrics. Outside, the evening music of birds and cricketswould commence.

On the morning that we left for Mattru Jong, we loaded our backpacks with notebooks oflyrics we were working on and stuffed our pockets with cassettes of rap albums. In thosedays we wore baggy jeans, and underneath them we had soccer shorts and sweatpants fordancing. Under our long-sleeved shirts we had sleeveless undershirts, T-shirts, and soccerjerseys. We wore three pairs of socks that we pulled down and folded to make ourcrapes* look puffy. When it got too hot in the day, we took some of the clothes off andcarried them on our shoulders. They were fashionable, and we had no idea that thisunusual way of dressing was going to benefit us. Since we intended to return the nextday, we didn’t say goodbye or tell anyone where we were going. We didn’t know that wewere leaving home, never to return.

To save money, we decided to walk the sixteen miles to Mattru Jong. It was abeautiful summer day, the sun wasn’t too hot, and the walk didn’t feel long either, as wechatted about all kinds of things, mocked and chased each other. We carried slingshotsthat we used to stone birds and chase the monkeys that tried to cross the main dirt road.We stopped at several rivers to swim. At one river that had a bridge across it, we heard apassenger vehicle in the distance and decided to get out of the water and see if we couldcatch a free ride. I got out before Junior and Talloi, and ran across the bridge with their

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts clothes. They thought they could catch up with me before the vehicle reached the bridge,but upon realizing that it was impossible, they started running back to the river, and justwhen they were in the middle of the bridge, the vehicle caught up to them. The girls inthe truck laughed and the driver tapped his horn. It was funny, and for the rest of the tripthey tried to get me back for what I had done, but they failed.

We arrived at Kabati, my grandmother’s village, around two in the afternoon.Mamie Kpana was the name that my grandmother was known by. She was tall and herperfectly long face complemented her beautiful cheekbones and big brown eyes. Shealways stood with her hands either on her hips or on her head. By looking at her, I couldsee where my mother had gotten her beautiful dark skin, extremely white teeth, and thetranslucent creases on her neck. My grandfather or kamor—teacher, as everyone calledhim—was a well-known local Arabic scholar and healer in the village and beyond.

At Kabati, we ate, rested a bit, and started the last six miles. Grandmother wantedus to spend the night, but we told her that we would be back the following day.

“How is that father of yours treating you these days?” she asked in a sweet voicethat was laden with worry.

“Why are you going to Mattru Jong, if not for school? And why do you look soskinny?” she continued asking, but we evaded her questions. She followed us to the edgeof the village and watched as we descended the hill, switching her walking stick to herleft hand so that she could wave us off with her right hand, a sign of good luck.

We arrived in Mattru Jong a couple of hours later and met up with old friends, Gibrilla,Kaloko, and Khalilou. That night we went out to Bo Road, where street vendors sold foodlate into the night. We bought boiled groundnut and ate it as we conversed about what wewere going to do the next day, made plans to see the space for the talent show andpractice. We stayed in the verandah room of Khalilou’s house. The room was small andhad a tiny bed, so the four of us (Gibrilla and Kaloko went back to their houses) slept inthe same bed, lying across with our feet hanging. I was able to fold my feet in a littlemore since I was shorter and smaller than all the other boys.

The next day Junior, Talloi, and I stayed at Khalilou’s house and waited for ourfriends to return from school at around 2:00 p.m. But they came home early. I wascleaning my crapes and counting for Junior and Talloi, who were having a push-upcompetition. Gibrilla and Kaloko walked onto the verandah and joined the competition.Talloi, breathing hard and speaking slowly, asked why they were back. Gibrilla explainedthat the teachers had told them that the rebels had attacked Mogbwemo, our home.School had been canceled until further notice. We stopped what we were doing.

According to the teachers, the rebels had attacked the mining areas in theafternoon. The sudden outburst of gunfire had caused people to run for their lives indifferent directions. Fathers had come running from their workplaces, only to stand in

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts front of their empty houses with no indication of where their families had gone. Motherswept as they ran toward schools, rivers, and water taps to look for their children. Childrenran home to look for parents who were wandering the streets in search of them. And asthe gunfire intensified, people gave up looking for their loved ones and ran out of town.

“This town will be next, according to the teachers.” Gibrilla lifted himself fromthe cement floor. Junior, Talloi, and I took our backpacks and headed to the wharf withour friends. There, people were arriving from all over the mining area. Some we knew,but they couldn’t tell us the whereabouts of our families. They said the attack had beentoo sudden, too chaotic; that everyone had fled in different directions in total confusion.

For more than three hours, we stayed at the wharf, anxiously waiting andexpecting either to see our families or to talk to someone who had seen them. But therewas no news of them, and after a while we didn’t know any of the people who cameacross the river. The day seemed oddly normal. The sun peacefully sailed through thewhite clouds, birds sang from treetops, the trees danced to the quiet wind. I still couldn’tbelieve that the war had actually reached our home. It is impossible, I thought. When weleft home the day before, there had been no indication the rebels were anywhere near.

“What are you going to do?” Gibrilla asked us. We were all quiet for a while, andthen Talloi broke the silence. “We must go back and see if we can find our familiesbefore it is too late.”

Junior and I nodded in agreement.

Just three days earlier, I had seen my father walking slowly from work. His hard hat wasunder his arm and his long face was sweating from the hot afternoon sun. I was sitting onthe verandah. I had not seen him for a while, as another stepmother had destroyed ourrelationship again. But that morning my father smiled at me as he came up the steps. Heexamined my face, and his lips were about to utter something, when my stepmother cameout. He looked away, then at my stepmother, who pretended not to see me. They quietlywent into the parlor. I held back my tears and left the verandah to meet with Junior at thejunction where we waited for the lorry. We were on our way to see our mother in the nexttown about three miles away. When our father had paid for our school, we had seen heron weekends over the holidays when we were back home. Now that he refused to pay, wevisited her every two or three days. That afternoon we met Mother at the market andwalked with her as she purchased ingredients to cook for us. Her face was dull at first,but as soon as she hugged us, she brightened up. She told us that our little brother,Ibrahim, was at school and that we would go get him on our way from the market. Sheheld our hands as we walked, and every so often she would turn around as if to seewhether we were still with her.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts As we walked to our little brother’s school, Mother turned to us and said, “I amsorry I do not have enough money to put you boys back in school at this point. I amworking on it.” She paused and then asked, “How is your father these days?”

“He seems all right. I saw him this afternoon,” I replied. Junior didn’t sayanything.

Mother looked him directly in the eyes and said, “Your father is a good man andhe loves you very much. He just seems to attract the wrong stepmothers for you boys.”

When we got to the school, our little brother was in the yard playing soccer withhis friends. He was eight and pretty good for his age. As soon as he saw us, he camerunning, throwing himself on us. He measured himself against me to see if he had gottentaller than me. Mother laughed. My little brother’s small round face glowed, and sweatformed around the creases he had on his neck, just like my mother’s. All four of uswalked to Mother’s house. I held my little brother’s hand, and he told me about schooland challenged me to a soccer game later in the evening. My mother was single anddevoted herself to taking care of Ibrahim. She said he sometimes asked about our father.When Junior and I were away in school, she had taken Ibrahim to see him a few times,and each time she had cried when my father hugged Ibrahim, because they were both sohappy to see each other. My mother seemed lost in her thoughts, smiling as she relivedthe moments.

Two days after that visit, we had left home. As we now stood at the wharf inMattru Jong, I could visualize my father holding his hard hat and running back homefrom work, and my mother, weeping and running to my little brother’s school. A sinkingfeeling overtook me.

Junior, Talloi, and I jumped into a canoe and sadly waved to our friends as the canoepulled away from the shores of Mattru Jong. As we landed on the other side of the river,more and more people were arriving in haste. We started walking, and a woman carryingher flip-flops on her head spoke without looking at us: “Too much blood has been spilledwhere you are going. Even the good spirits have fled from that place.” She walked pastus. In the bushes along the river, the strained voices of women cried out, “Nguwor gbormu ma oo,” God help us, and screamed the names of their children: “Yusufu, Jabu, Foday. . .” We saw children walking by themselves, shirtless, in their underwear, following thecrowd. “Nya nje oo, nya keke oo,” my mother, my father, the children were crying. Therewere also dogs running, in between the crowds of people, who were still running, eventhough far away from harm. The dogs sniffed the air, looking for their owners. My veinstightened.

We had walked six miles and were now at Kabati, Grandmother’s village. It wasdeserted. All that was left were footprints in the sand leading toward the dense forest thatspread out beyond the village.

As evening approached, people started arriving from the mining area. Theirwhispers, the cries of little children seeking lost parents and tired of walking, and the

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts wails of hungry babies replaced the evening songs of crickets and birds. We sat onGrandmother’s verandah, waiting and listening.

“Do you guys think it is a good idea to go back to Mogbwemo?” Junior asked.But before either of us had a chance to answer, a Volkswagen roared in the distance andall the people walking on the road ran into the nearby bushes. We ran, too, but didn’t gothat far. My heart pounded and my breathing intensified. The vehicle stopped in front ofmy grandmother’s house, and from where we lay, we could see that whoever was insidethe car was not armed. As we, and others, emerged from the bushes, we saw a man runfrom the driver’s seat to the sidewalk, where he vomited blood. His arm was bleeding.When he stopped vomiting, he began to cry. It was the first time I had seen a grown mancry like a child, and I felt a sting in my heart. A woman put her arms around the man andbegged him to stand up. He got to his feet and walked toward the van. When he openedthe door opposite the driver’s, a woman who was leaning against it fell to the ground.Blood was coming out of her ears. People covered the eyes of their children.

In the back of the van were three more dead bodies, two girls and a boy, and theirblood was all over the seats and the ceiling of the van. I wanted to move away from whatI was seeing, but couldn’t. My feet went numb and my entire body froze. Later welearned that the man had tried to escape with his family and the rebels had shot at hisvehicle, killing all his family. The only thing that consoled him, for a few seconds atleast, was when the woman who had embraced him, and now cried with him, told himthat at least he would have the chance to bury them. He would always know where theywere laid to rest, she said. She seemed to know a little more about war than the rest of us.

The wind had stopped moving and daylight seemed to be quickly giving in tonight. As sunset neared, more people passed through the village. One man carried hisdead son. He thought the boy was still alive. The father was covered with his son’s blood,and as he ran he kept saying, “I will get you to the hospital, my boy, and everything willbe fine.” Perhaps it was necessary that he cling to false hopes, since they kept himrunning away from harm. A group of men and women who had been pierced by straybullets came running next. The skin that hung down from their bodies still containedfresh blood. Some of them didn’t notice that they were wounded until they stopped andpeople pointed to their wounds. Some fainted or vomited. I felt nauseated, and my headwas spinning. I felt the ground moving, and people’s voices seemed to be far removedfrom where I stood trembling.

The last casualty that we saw that evening was a woman who carried her baby onher back. Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail. Herchild had been shot dead as she ran for her life. Luckily for her, the bullet didn’t gothrough the baby’s body. When she stopped at where we stood, she sat on the ground andremoved her child. It was a girl, and her eyes were still open, with an interrupted innocentsmile on her face. The bullets could be seen sticking out just a little bit in the baby’s body

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts and she was swelling. The mother clung to her child and rocked her. She was in too muchpain and shock to shed tears.

Junior, Talloi, and I looked at each other and knew that we must return to MattruJong, because we had seen that Mogbwemo was no longer a place to call home and thatour parents couldn’t possibly be there anymore. Some of the wounded people kept sayingthat Kabati was next on the rebels’ list. We didn’t want to be there when the rebelsarrived. Even those who couldn’t walk very well did their best to keep moving away fromKabati. The image of that woman and her baby plagued my mind as we walked back toMattru Jong. I barely noticed the journey, and when I drank water I didn’t feel any reliefeven though I knew I was thirsty. I didn’t want to go back to where that woman wasfrom; it was clear in the eyes of the baby that all had been lost.

Excerpted from A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.Copyright © 2007 by Ishmael Beah. Published in February 2007 by Sarah CrichtonBooks, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

http://www.alongwaygone.com/media/ALongWayGone_Excerpt.pdf

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Anti-Humanitarian Aid The moral case for ending assistance to dictatorships

Jens F. Laurson & George A. Pieler|Mar. 10, 2006 3:44 pm

Aid to Africa remains a favorite cause for politicians and entertainers. From Geldoff to Bono to Blair, everyone

wants credit for attacking poverty. Africa's dire need is undisputed, but good intentions aside, could it be that aid

actually harms Africans—and that less help would do more good?

Western wealth is supposed to speed African development and fight grinding poverty, but the result doesn't match

the intent. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has single-handedly destroyed the economy with western aid flowing.

After a quarter-century of Mugabe, 80 percent of Zimbabweans live below the poverty line, inflation has soared to

triple digits, and "land reform"—subsidized with British "development support"—takes lives and destroys

agriculture. Mugabe takes the cash and blames the West, trashing the human rights of both large landowners and

defenseless slumdwellers in Harare.

But surely "humanitarian aid" saves lives, right? New York University economics professor William Easterly

points out that $568 billion in cumulative aid "still [has] not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines

to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths." Kenyan economist James Shikwati contends western drought

assistance undermined Kenya's farmers and merely delayed reforms. Good intentions can't justify stupid aid.

This is the moral conundrum: Can the hypothetical lives lost from ending aid outweigh the greater loss of life

from each additional month a corrupt regime is subsidized, destroying its country for personal gain? If so, should

we offer de facto support to that regime? We think that in this case, at least, the moral question answers itself. Yet

by and large, the West won't ask the question.

The 20th century gives searing examples of impossible moral choices. In war-torn Germany the young members

of the resistance movement Die Weiße Rose confronted their dilemma by refusing to donate sweaters, blankets,

and food to German soldiers on the Eastern front. Even Germans who didn't support the Nazi regime felt a moral

duty to support the innocent "cogs in the machine' who starved, froze, and bled to death in the Russian trenches.

But Sophie Scholl's moral compass dictated withholding support from these innocents who, ultimately, prolonged

the life of a government she deemed immoral. Her refusal to donate stunned many at the time, despite the moral

clarity of the alternatives. If Die Weiße Rose's choice was brave but morally easy, the West confronts a less

courageous but perhaps more difficult choice, shaded in tones of gray.

Western countries have a post-colonial complex, ignoring abuses of power in Africa for fear of being called

meddling or racist. Even the worst offenders, like Uganda's Idi Amin, paid little for crimes against their people,

posturing as indigenous leaders for modern Africa. But there are signs Europe might forget its colonialist history

long enough to speak out against rampant corruption and lawlessness in Africa. The IMF may give Zimbabwe a

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts pass for destroying its economy, and excuse Mugabe's gang for their outrageous, ongoing crimes against their

own people—but Kenya's government-by-crony faces a harsh new negative light. Britain, citing rampant

corruption, has withdrawn direct aid from Kenya. This small step, followed by the dramatic resignation of finance

minister David Mwiraria, is a move in the right direction.

Surely we grasp that nobly motivated aid does more harm than good when it props up corrupt and brutal regimes.

Dictators who demand aid to stave off mass starvation must account for the misery and hunger caused when they

divert aid to supporters and cut off opponents. Why should they benefit politically while aid wrecks local

agriculture? Aid placates enough people to ensure the regime's survival, but for every soul saved by foreign aid,

more will perish because of the continued existence of that regime.

The problem extends to multilateral development banks, which make some of the worst aid decisions and lack

direct political accountability. An anti-corruption gloss like the U.N.'s Millennium Project encourages the World

Bank to "target" aid to nations with "good governance." Yet as NYU's Easterly points out, the 63 nations

identified by the U.N. as having such governance include some of the most corrupt in the world (Nigeria, Chad).

Is it any wonder that multilateral aid is doesn't correlate with economic progress in Africa? Free market rhetoric

isn't enough. The West must start offering the tough love which is Africa's only true hope.

Nations and multinational institutions that want to help Africa should beg, cajole, and browbeat its nations to

remove trade barriers continent-wide, the fastest and least risky way to enhance wealth and bring support directly

to the small farmers, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs who are Africa's future.

It's not easy to deny aid to innocents for fear of keeping afloat an evil regime. We appreciate how difficult that

decision was during the Third Reich, as morally unambiguous an era as any in history. Our challenge today is

more ethically complex, entangling us with regimes of lesser criminality that menace their own people. Between

extremes of forcible overthrow and outright support, Western societies too often give dictators implicit support

pitched as humanitarian "help" for the powerless, disenfranchised and starving.

That fails the moral test. Official aid policy must be fundamentally rethought for the worst regimes; it must be

driven by the goal of sustaining the African people, not dictators in league with ideologically blinded do-gooders.

The West would then stake a genuine moral claim in Africa and make concrete its obligation to uphold the

principles of liberal democracy—not just in cross-border relations, but in the posture of African states, elected or

unelected, towards their own beleaguered people. Why be afraid to show the way?


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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Elie Wiesel: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Elie Wiesel's Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986

It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends me. This both frightens and pleases me.

It frightens me because I wonder: do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? ... I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

It pleases me because I may say that this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: "Can this be true?" This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: "Tell me," he asks. "What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?"

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my peoples' memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands ... But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. And then, too, there are the Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore. Violence and terrorism are not the

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts answer. Something must be done about their suffering, and soon. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.

Yes, I have faith. Faith in God and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all. Isn't this the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1986, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1987

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1986

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-acceptance_en.html

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The case against aid The world’s humanitarian aid organizations may do more harm than good, argues Linda Polmn

By Farah Stockman: Globe Staff / September 12, 2010

In 1859, a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant took a business trip to Italy, where he happened upon the aftermath of a particularly bloody battle in the Austro-Sardinian War. Tens of thousands of soldiers were left dead or wounded on the battlefield, with no medical attention. He was so shaken by the experience that he went on to found what is known today as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Today, in the vocabulary of war, the ICRC and other aid organization like it are known as the good guys in a world full of bad guys. They swarm into refugee camps all over the world with tents, potable water, flour, and medicine, providing relief and disregarding politics.

But what if those relief efforts ultimately help fighters regain their strength and return to battle, prolonging a terrible war? What if such aid projects are hijacked by genocidal despots to swell their own coffers? What if cynical leaders have learned how to manufacture humanitarian disasters just to attract aid money? And what if the aid groups know all this, but turn a blind eye so that they can compete for a slice of a $160 billion industry?

“The Crisis Caravan,” a new book by journalist Linda Polman, joins a long tradition of exposes written by aid skeptics, many of whom are insiders to the business. Polman was not privy to the inner circle of any aid group, so she often relies on anecdotes told by unnamed sources to make her case. Nevertheless, she gives some powerful examples of unconscionable assistance: How the international community fed Hutu fighters who had committed genocide in Rwanda, and who then continued their violent campaigns from the UN-funded refugee camps; how the Ethiopian government manufactured a famine, and then used aid groups to lure people away from their homes toward a life of forced labor. In Polman’s world, these are not exceptions, but the rule in a world where aid workers have become enablers of the very atrocities they seek to relieve.

Polman, who is based in Amsterdam, spoke to Ideas by telephone from France, and later by telephone from Norway.

IDEAS: What made you so disillusioned by aid work?

POLMAN: I was living in Sierra Leone in West Africa in 2000, 2001, when the peace agreement was signed between the government and the RUF....I was a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper and Dutch radio, covering the war and the UN operations that [were] trying to lure the country out of the hands of the rebels. All the time I was there, the country was in total darkness. There was no electricity. There were no radios. With the peace accord, the aid budget was released for Sierra Leone, and with the release of the aid budget, the caravan of aid was released....In a very short time, there were over 200 NGOS moved into the country.

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Everything changed. For the first couple of days, I was happy with that. I thought the country was going to be rescued. But because I knew the country quite well, I saw it was the people I considered the bad guys — the political elites who were responsible for the war — they were the ones who had access to the aid. I thought, this can’t be right. That’s when I started to research what happens in other countries. It is always what happens. It is always the elites and the strongmen who profit.

IDEAS: Your book says that food aid is always used as a weapon of war by the very fighters that create humanitarian disasters in the first place. Is aid always bad? Would the world be a better place without it?

POLMAN: I believe that aid could be given in a much more efficient and less dangerous way....After every humanitarian intervention, the aid organizations analyze what went well and what went wrong. Every analysis...says the weakest point is that the aid organizations are not cooperating well enough, which makes them vulnerable to abuse of the aid.

IDEAS: You don’t cite any examples of good aid projects. Is anybody out there doing it right?

POLMAN: I know of an orphanage in Haiti that has been there for the past 35 years. It has proved over the past 35 years that it is doing a good job. But if the humanitarian world decides en masse to move into one war zone where the bad guys are waiting for them with open arms, they should expect many problems and many instances of abuse.

IDEAS: You talk in your book about how Florence Nightingale eventually developed a philosophy that we should just let wars be as terrible as possible, so that people would stop having them. Would there be less war without aid?

POLMAN: We don’t know, because we never tried to stop aid and then count the amount of wars, or count the amount of days that wars go on. But the thoughts of Florence Nightingale make sense to me. The cost...of the war should be left in the hands of the people who want the war. She thought that if you make it easier for warmongers to have their wars, then you prolong them and make them more severe.

IDEAS: A central tenet of aid workers is political neutrality. In the book, you write that this is often a farce. Should aid take sides in a war? Would it be more effective if it did?

POLMAN: The reality is that aid is not being given a choice. Aid is being used by parties that are at war with each other. Even if aid wants to be neutral, the choice is made for them....If an aid organization cannot decide itself how to distribute aid, when to distribute aid, to whom to distribute aid, if the aid organization doesn’t have the power to make decisions about its own aid, you can do two things. You can say, “Well, that is just reality.” Or you can say, “We will not deliver the aid.”...Medecins Sans Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders] does it sometimes. Sometimes they make the moral stance, and sometimes they don’t.

IDEAS: What is the worst example of abuse of aid that you saw?

POLMAN: In Sierra Leone, I realized that the rebel soldiers who had been hacking off people’s hands and feet, they actually could explain to me how to manipulate the aid system....They explained to me that for 10

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts years, all those years they were fighting and the West didn’t want to hear about their war. It was only after they started to amputate people, more people and more people, that the international community was taking notice of their war. Those simple rebel soldiers in Africa could explain to me how that aid system works. That alarmed me....

A Security Council report this year concluded that up to half of the World Food program money — $485 million per year — for Somalia is diverted from the people who actually need it, to a web of corrupt contractors, Islamic militants, and local UN staff members who are also involved in this scheme. We can shrug our shoulders about $245 million a year, but in Somalia, this is a lot of money and it is fueling conflict, and it is fueling the wrong people.

Farah Stockman, foreign affairs reporter for the Boston Globe, also runs an educational program for street children in Kenya. [email protected].

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/12/the_worlds_humanitarian_aid_organizations_may_do_more_harm_than_good_argues_linda_polman/?page=full

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Universal Declaration of Human Rights Background: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.

Preamble

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore, The General Assembly, Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article I All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2 Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3 Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

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Article 5 No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Article 6 Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7 All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8 Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10 Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11 1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. 2. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. 2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14 1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. 2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15 1. Everyone has the right to a nationality. 2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16 1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. 2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. 3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17 1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. 2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19 Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. 2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21 1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. 2. Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country. 3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22 Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23 1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. 2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. 3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. 4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24 Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. Article 25 1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26 1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. 2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. 3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27 1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29 1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. 2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. 3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30 Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts We Meant WellBackground: From a State Department insider, the first book recounting our misguided efforts to rebuild Iraq—a shocking and rollicking true-life report. Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity? According to Peter Van Buren, we bought all these projects and more in an expensive hearts-and-minds campaign. We Meant Well is his eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge—that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed.

The reconstruction of Iraq was the largest nation- building program in history, dwarfing in cost, size, and complexity even those undertaken after World War II to rebuild Germany and Japan. At a cost to the US taxpayer of over $63 billion and counting, the plan was lavishly funded, yet, as government inspectors found, the efforts were characterized from the beginning by pervasive waste and inefficiency, mistaken judgments, fl awed policies, and structural weaknesses. Of those thousands of acts of waste and hundreds of mistaken judgments, some portion was made by me and the two reconstruction teams I led in Iraq, along with my good willed but overwhelmed and unprepared colleagues in the State Department, the military, and dozens of other US government agencies. We were the ones who famously helped paste together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck. The scholarly history someone will one day write about Iraq and reconstruction will need the raw material of failure, and so this war story will try to explain how it all went so wrong.

As a longtime Foreign Service Officer (FSO), I was sent by the Department of State to Iraq for one year in 2009 as part of the civilian Surge deployed to backstop the manlier military one. Along with a half dozen contractors as teammates, I was assigned to rebuild Iraq’s essential services, to supply water and sewer access as part of a counterinsurgency struggle to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It was Vietnam, only better this time around, more T. E. Lawrence than Alden Pyle. I was to create projects that would lift the local economy and lure young men away from the dead- end opportunities of al Qaeda. I was also to empower women, turning them into entrepreneurs and handing them a future instead of a suicide vest. A robust consumer society would do the trick, shopping bags of affirmation leading to democracy.

Executing all this happiness required me to live with the Army as part of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT) on a Forward Operating Base (FOB, rhymes with “cob”). I spent the first six months on FOB Hammer in the desert halfway between Baghdad and Iran before moving to FOB Falcon just south of Baghdad for another half a year. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the United States established massive military bases throughout Iraq. Some, like the grows- like- crabgrass Victory Base (the military has little sense of irony), were as big as cities, with thousands of personnel, a Burger King, samba clubs, Turkish hookah bars, and swimming pools. Some were much smaller, such as FOBs Hammer and Falcon, with a couple of hundred soldiers each, Army food, and portable latrines.

My work with the ePRTs involved traveling off the FOBs to commute to the war. Unlike so- called fobbits, who spent most of their tour on base, I spent a lot of time outside the wire. I was to meet with Iraqis, hand them money for the projects we hoped would spring up, and then assess the results of our spending. Despite endless applications of money and violence prior to my arrival, the United States had failed to pacify Iraq, undertaking projects and holding elections in an endless loop of turning points and imagined progress. “Hurt ’em and feed ’em” was the cynical way it was referred to in Vietnam, dropping bombs at night on an area where we dropped food during the daylight hours, destroying history after dark and reconstructing it by day. In Iraq my predecessors evolved nicer ways of describing what we were trying to do, such as “counterinsurgency” or “civil capacity building.” Regardless of the label, the one constant was that I could travel nowhere without an armored vehicle and armed soldiers for protection. Some of the soldiers on the FOB

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts drove us around and pulled security for my team and me. The soldiers didn’t seem to mind the task, as it was easy duty, albeit a bit boring, the day-to-day of imperial policing. We spent hours stuck in armored vehicles, a tedium that made golf seem like a contact sport, shared the futility of reconstructing things while they were still falling apart, and became close to one another in the intense but temporary way of relationships formed in war, like twelve months of one- night stands.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really began in the early 1990s, as I sat ignorant in Taiwan processing tourist visas as a brand- new Foreign Service Officer while Saddam invaded Kuwait. Iraq had since then been continuously under siege by the United States. During Desert Storm we destroyed large portions of its infrastructure. We had gone out of our way to make a mess, using clever tools such as cruise missiles that spat metallic fibers to short out entire electrical systems we would have to reconstruct. In the years that followed Desert Storm, three US Presidents bombed and rocketed Iraq, running up the bill we would later have to pay. Sanctions meanwhile kept Saddam fat and happy on black- market oil profits while chiseling away Baghdad’s cosmopolitan First World veneer and plunging most of Iraq’s population into poverty. Events in Iraq ebbed and fl owed through the US media over the years but the storm never ended for most Iraqis. It was a seamless epic as the war of 1990– 91 continued through the no- fl y zones and the sanctions of the nineties, to be capped off by the 2003 invasion and the ensuing years of occupation.

The script for the 2003 invasion did not include an extended reconstruction effort. It instead imagined Americans being greeted as liberators like in post- D-day France, with cheerful natives rushing out to offer our spunky troops bottles of wine and frisky daughters. The Bush administration ignored the somber prewar predictions of the State Department, cut it out of the immediate postwar process, and instead whipped together a blended family of loyal interns, contractors, and soldiers to witness the complete implosion of Iraqi civil society. Things got steadily worse in Iraq as the early Coalition Provisional Authority and military efforts at reconstruction failed, the UN was bypassed, and the security situation discouraged even the hardiest NGOs (non-governmental organizations). By about 2005, the White House saw the need to kick the war into higher gear, sending in the increased deployment of troops known as the Surge, while the Pentagon dusted off the old books from Vietnam for tips on counterinsurgency philosophy.

There was originally in the military about as much enthusiasm for reviving counterinsurgency as there might have been for reinstating horse- borne cavalry charges and cutlasses. We were back in a Vietnam kind of war. It wasn’t enough just to kill people and destroy villages. We had to win over the ones still alive, get them to adopt a democratic system and become our allies. Victory would be ours not when we pacified Iraq militarily but when the country was stable enough to stand on its own. This was counterinsurgency, hearts and minds, soft power, whatever you wanted to call it. In the improvisational spirit of the whole war, it was decided that the State Department had better get involved in a big way. State would rebuild and reconstruct Iraq, win over the people with democracy, and then we could all pack up for home.

The vehicle for these accomplishments would be State Department– led Provincial Reconstruction Teams like the ones I served on […]

I had never served in the Middle East and knew nothing about rebuilding past the Home Depot guides, but people like me were what the Department had been dealt to play this game. The new rules boxed me into serving or seeing my career flatline. Less cynically, despite my reservations about the war, I still believed in the idea of service (love the warrior, hate the war) and wanted to test myself. I also needed the money, and so the nexus of duty, honor, terrorism, and my oldest daughter’s college tuition (hopefully there’ll be another war when my youngest is college age) led another FSO into semi-voluntarily joining The Cause. Between war and peace lies reconstruction and I would try to do my part. But first, training, or so I thought.

Despite the enormity of our task and the stated importance to the interests of the United States, preparation for PRT duty was amazingly brief, all of three weeks. Week One was five days of what we called Islam for Dummies, a quick overview of the religion with some pointers on “Arab” culture (dudes kiss, no serving bacon, no joking about God). Some mention of Sunnis and Shias was made

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Performance Tasks to Support English Language Arts but the conflict came off more like a sports rivalry than open warfare. The instructor was former military and sounded a lot like Dr. Phil, which was very comforting. It felt like we would be holding an intervention for the war, forcing it to confront its shortcomings—“Tell him, tell him to his face, you are a bad war. You disappointed me, war.” Dr. Phil also gave us our only Arabic language training, ninety minutes of handy phrases and greetings.

Week Two was an overview of the simple spreadsheets and database we’d use to track millions of dollars of project grants, plus a negotiating session where a local Iraqi American was called in to pretend to be a town mayor. He asked for a bribe and then gave me permission to build a dam (in Iraq I never built any dams and there were no mayors in the small towns I visited). Since the class included both longtime State employees and our new contractor colleagues, we all sat politely through a dreary session on how an embassy works. Since there was nothingMiddle Eastern in the neighborhood, the class went out as a group to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Really good pork buns.

Week Three took place at an undisclosed location in West Virginia where we learned defensive driving skills (none of us ever drove on the streets of Iraq) and had a weapons familiarization course (all FSOs in Iraq were unarmed). The last time I punched someone was in junior high school. I was never in the military. I had at that moment never fired a weapon. A Real Man with a biker beard, angry tats, an NYPD baseball cap, and serious sunglasses loaded a weapon (I called them guns then) and carefully placed it in my hands. He kept his own veined, masculine paws on the cold steel, helped me aim it at a very nearby target, and then told me to pull the trigger. He did this for our group of about twenty- five State Department employees. After each shot, without looking at the target or the shooter, the Man said, “Hit, good shot,” and took the weapon back to prepare for the next person.

After only fifteen school days I was fully trained to lead an ePRT in the midst of a shooting war. Missing from the training was any history of the war and our policy, any review of past or current reconstruction projects, any information on military organization, acronyms, and rank structure, any lessons learned from the previous years’ work, or any idea of what the hell a PRT was and what our job was going to be. They never told us anything about what we were supposed to do once we got there. What we did get was a firm handshake from Dr. Phil and a ride to the airport. I was off to Iraq.

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/WeMeantWelExcerpt.pdf

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