Austerity.

I used to think of it as an Old School virtue, right up there with probity and tithing and flossing. But these days I see a glint in the eye of some who use it, and I know just what they mean: Let’s tighten the screws on the losers.

Not exactly the holiday spirit. I need an antidote. And I’ve found one.

The chorus of P.S. 22, on Staten Island.

If you made it to the end of the Academy Awards this year, you saw these 10-year-olds singing “Over the Rainbow.” If you watched “Oprah” the next day, you saw them sing Katy Perry’s “Firework”—well, until Katy Perry stepped out of the wings and took over. Maybe you’re among the 38 million who have watched them on YouTube. Or visited the chorus on its award-winning website.

For fifth graders, they sure get around.

The credit—all of it—goes to Gregg Breinberg, a 36-year-old music teacher at P.S. 22 who founded the chorus in 2000. Much more is involved here than finding kids with good voices. Some of the choir’s members are in the special education program. Some are studying English as a second language. And the school is in a district where more than three-quarters of the students are eligible for free lunch.

Is self-esteem under threat here? Believe it. The biggest achievement of the chorus isn’t that it will reveal the next Katy Perry. It’s that, over the course of a year, the kids learn to feel good about themselves. “Self-confidence is the key to everything in life; you have to just believe in yourself,” Breinberg has said. “If they find that one thing that they can do well, that will carry over. We’ve seen kids make amazing strides, kids that were failing jump to the top of their class.”

And then there’s the music. It may be pop, but it’s not bubble-gum or kid-friendly.  And can we talk about great performers? Watch what happens 45 seconds into “Firework.”

And it happens again—in the first second—in “Rolling in the Deep.”

“At first, when I sang, I had no emotion,” a girl says. “I didn’t move. But Mr. B taught me to sing with feeling. With feeling and heart.”

Words and music. Feeling and heart. Someone making a difference. On the group’s web site, this motto: “When you do what you love, things can happen for you.” The clichés go on and on.

Here’s something that’s not a cliché: Salon.com just named Gregg Breinberg the “sexiest man” of 2011.

Which led the writer to ask: “How has the success of the choir affected your personal life?”

“Honestly, it’s killed it,” he replied.

But he wasn’t complaining.