Let's celebrate PS 22 and the wonderful teachers and students of NYC public schools!

Amid all the controversies about budget cuts, school closings and layoffs, sometimes we should just sit back and celebrate some of the exemplary teachers and terrific kids that make up NYC schools. Unfortunately even the wonderful performance of PS 22 in Staten Island at the Oscars has been politicized. While Daily News columnist Michael Daly used veteran chorus director Gregg Breinberg as an example for getting rid of “last in, first out” layoff rules, it was LIFO that led Breinberg to PS 22 in the first place, as Gotham Schools points out.

But never mind; here is what Mel Meer, a parent leader in Queens, writes about that performance and then watch it yourself. See also what Doug Israel of the Center for Arts Education wrote about this event and how it reveals the need for more arts in the schools :

The kids from Staten Island's PS 22 closed the Oscar performance with a beautiful, fully harmonized, rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Their performance exceeds, by a wide margin, the standards for elementary music set forth by the DOE. It certainly exceeds, by even a wider margin, anything I have heard in two local elementary schools in middle to upper-middle class Northeastern Queens.

Kids are often capable of much more than we ask of them. They are evidently led by a dedicated teacher encouraging their performance to a high level for their ages. This also, unfortunately, illustrates by the exception what we are losing in the arts because of the test-prep mentality of the current system.

See the performance, if you haven't already done so below.

-- Melvyn Meer

Hurray for Hollywood!

Shocker! Waiting for Superman, the most heavily promoted documentary of all time, was snubbed for an Oscar nomination!

The film failed to get an Oscar nod, despite millions spent on making and promoting it by the privateers. Did Diane Ravitch's brilliant critique in the NY Review of Books have a negative effect?

Here's the first article in Movieline, back in November, that suggested her scathing review might hurt the film’s chances to win, but I don’t think anyone anticipated it would not be nominated.

Here’s the analysis by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post which followed, speculating whether Diane’s takedown might have an effect on its chance to grab the prize.

Clearly, if anything the movie should have been considered in the category of fictional drama instead; see why in my Huff Post column, Fact-checking Waiting for 'Superman': Documentary or Urban Myth? Here are other corrections from Choire Sicha,; the NY Times also revealed how the moviemaker had faked certain scenes.

Now, Inside Job appears to be the Oscar favorite in this category (& my own!) A similar film needs to be made about the “inside job” now being done to undermine and privatize public education.

Let's hope the failure of Waiting for Superman means the tide is turning, and that people are no longer going to by the empty propaganda foisted us by the Billionaire Boys Club.

Thanks to David Bellel for the brilliant illustration.