townhall meeting this afternoon. and today the justice department got the ball rolling on appealing don t ask, don t tell, that ruling. why is the obama administration trying to snatch the defeat of jaws of victory this one, i don t know. and also on sirius and also ernie istook. and fellow at the heritage foundation. ernie, what s happening? are you guys just embracing the tea party across the board? you want to abolish public education now, what s happening here? well, that s neither what the heritage foundation says nor what the tea party movement stands for. don t mistake what one individual may say and try to say that s the beliefs of a large number of people. you ought to have some the heritage foundation education experts on to talk about the we had them on before and they didn t impress me, quite frankly. but i m well, maybe i m asking you, ernie. i m asking you you can emphatically state tonight that the republican party and the heritage foundation will not elimi
more than 100 democrats balked at the $4.5 billion healthy lunches bill because it s paid for in part with cuts to the federal food stamp program. and how to improve school lunches seems to be a challenge. the national school lunch program feeds 31 million children every day, and, in fact, many of those kids get the breakfast program, too. yet education experts and tv chefs and documentarians keep providing proof of how bad that food really is. it s horrible. i mean, they eat like their lunches come in this little square container with a film wrap over it, so they have to peel the wrap off. ironically even fast-food chains have to let their customers know what s in what they re serving, so why isn t that the case with our schools? some of the food could be filled with salt and sugar, and it s, like, that hypes them up even more throughout the afternoon, which, of course, is tied to academics, you can t get them to sit down and do their assignment and it s tied to behavior because
when i teach them longer for a longer period. reporter: many students stay with the same teacher for several years. use english as much as possible. reporter: the average student speaks four languages, including english. and finland spends about $3,000 less per pupil than american schools do. so how do they achieve more? education experts credit involved parents. do you push your son? perhaps sometimes, yeah, to be honest, yes. reporter: equally important, they say, is the finnish culture that values education. teaching has been always and is still is a kind of appreciate yated profession. a report out this months says 47% of america s teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates. finnish teachers come from the top 10%. just like doctors and lawyers, finland s best and brightest are chosen to teach. ra rhema ellis.
graduate from high school, education experts say newark is now taking on another enormous challenge. if they fail, every foundation, every mayor and every governor will look at this as proof of why this may never work and it may never happen again. reporter: but the governor and the mayor and the philanthropists say they re determined to make newark a model for success. rehema ellis, newark, new jersey. starting tomorrow, nbc news presents education nation, a week-long look at what s wrong with our schools and what can be done to fix them. it all begins tomorrow at noon eastern. two-hour town hall with teachers hosted by brian williams. be sure and tune in for that. american hiker sara shourd is expressing thanks after finally being granted to a private meeting with president mahmoud ahmadinejad. shourd and her mother spoke with ahmadinejad friday hoping to convince the irinian leader to
poor or have limited english or struggles. neil: you took that into account. of course. we attempted to control for that. neil: very interesting stuff. jason, thank you very much. fair and balanced, to the union calling for the boycott. aj duffy, president of the united teachers of los angeles joins us on the phone. what do you think of this? you re not happy. why not. well, this is a seriously flawed study that jason has done. some of the most reputable people, education experts in the country, people like dan and linda darlham saying this approach is not good. neil: what s wrong that they did in the study that you didn t like? well first off they took a small sampling. only 6,000 on the test scores.