Stars and Fans Say Goodbye to ‘TRL’

By BEN SISARIO

There were superstar guests like 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé. There was a Top 10 video countdown. And there were bittersweet teenage squeals echoing through Times Square all night.

“TRL,” the afternoon video show that has been an MTV flagship for 10 years, came to an end on Sunday night with the network’s version of a New Orleans funeral. For three hours, a party of pop stars, former hosts and thousands of ecstatic young fans celebrated its legacy with shouts, hits, bling and tears.

For the 2,247th and last episode of “TRL,” Beyoncé sang and danced in the studio, Fall Out Boy played on a temporary stage on Broadway, 50 Cent apparently arrived just in time for his performance (although he made sure to swing by the press room earlier), and Ludacris, Snoop Dogg and Nelly shared a stage like a chummy hip-hop brat pack.

“This is like a big high school reunion in a way,” Mr. Timberlake told Carson Daly, the show’s former host, who had returned for the finale. “We kind of all grew up together.”

Not all guests had such wholesome toasts. Kid Rock entered the studio with a glass of beer, a fragrant cigar and a big grin. “I used to come here and they would say, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got to put the cigar out,’” he said. “Well, guess what? It’s over; I ain’t putting the cigar out.”

It would not be “TRL” without Diddy, the hip-hop producer and indefatigable self-promoter who has been the show’s most frequent guest. Making his 38th appearance, he watched a montage of his previous visits and had just begun to speak when Mr. Daly noticed that his eyes were watering behind his dark shades.

“Are you crying?” Mr. Daly asked. “You’re a good actor — I can’t tell.”

Diddy expressed his love for everyone on the show, down to the crew and cameramen, and later managed to plug his new fragrance and a forthcoming Notorious B.I.G. biopic in 15 seconds.

“TRL,” which began as “Total Request Live” but has long since been known by its initials, was an old-fashioned video variety show, with viewers voting on the most popular songs of the day. At its peak, in 1999 and 2000, when it was in perfect symbiosis with the teenage pop of Britney Spears, ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, the show had an average of more than 700,000 viewers a day, according to Nielsen.

But in the age of YouTube and online social networks, when a song’s popularity can be measured in clicks and music videos are just a keyword search away, “TRL” has been steadily losing its audience; for the last several years the show has had about half as many viewers as in 1999 and 2000.

In response to this decline, MTV has been building up a robust Web site and heavily promoting it on air. New videos are often introduced in what the network calls “credit squeezes” — brief clips played during the closing credits of the channel’s most popular shows — with viewers directed to watch the whole thing online.

If “TRL” has been losing its audience, it wasn’t apparent on Sunday night.

In a tradition going back to the show’s earliest days, when the Backstreet Boys and others could shut down traffic with a stampede of shrieking teenagers, fans lined up for hours behind police barricades around Times Square. They passed the day waving handmade signs and shouting whenever someone who looked like a celebrity passed near the windows of MTV’s studio.

Helena Mounesa, a 15-year-old from Brooklyn waiting outside the building with two friends, had withstood the shoving of the crowd since 2 p.m., and was rewarded with glimpses of Beyoncé and Snoop Dogg. Though a longtime fan of the show, she had never waited outside the studio before.

“I was waiting until I was 16,” she said. “But it’s ending now.”

courtesy of: NYTIMES

Getting Behind No Child Left Behind

Getting Behind No Child Left Behind – June 6, 2008 – The New York Sun

Getting Behind No Child Left Behind

By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 6, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/getting-behind-no-child-left-behind/79453/

The cable TV channel HBO will distribute a “report card” on the federal No Child Left Behind law later this month, in the form of a documentary about an inner-city high school.

The film, “Hard Times at Douglass High,” chronicles a year at a Baltimore City high school that has spent several years on Maryland’s failing list, Frederick Douglass.

HBO is calling the film a report card, but “Hard Times” doles out no As and Bs. It is more like the kind of judgment critics of the law have called for from No Child Left Behind: nuanced portrait characterized by a mix of measures, rather than hard “yes” or “no” judgments.

By the end of the year, Frederick Douglass had raised the portion of students passing Algebra to 12% from 1%, and the portion passing English to 25% from 12%. It has graduated its largest class in 10 years, according to the principal: 200 seniors, of an entering class of about 500.

In a particularly astonishing scene, the principal tells teachers that, in a departure from the past, “You will not be getting a proficient any more if the students are not making academic success.”

Yet there are also moments like the one, at the same staff meeting, in which a teacher challenges the new policy. How are his students supposed to succeed if he only has enough textbooks for 18 out of 25 of them? he asks.

And the one just before graduation, when two teachers marvel at how it is that 200 seniors are set to graduate, yet the number of students who passed all their courses is 150.

Several troubling statistics also arise. A college counselor says that only one student in the whole school scored more than 1,000 on the SAT college entrance exam.

The portion of teachers that is certified turns out to be 66%.

A well-liked English teacher becomes frustrated and quits midway through the year, leaving students to face a series of substitutes.

Of the 200 graduates, only 50 are said to go on to college.

There is also Back to School Night, which begins with the principal standing on the auditorium’s stage to greet a sea of empty red seats, and then trudges from classroom to classroom, asking teachers to report on attendance.

Four parents, the World History teacher reports. One parent, the science teacher says. “Hoping for more!” he adds, noting that there are still 30 minutes left for someone to show up.

An English teacher says the low figures are typical. “I think my greatest night was a night I had five parents show up,” he says.

Then he adds, “All five parents were of children who are doing so well that, honestly, I didn’t really need to see them.”