we re in the top half of the world in reading and science. the bottom tier in math. the tests that we use are different than the tests in high achieving countries. they have open ended essay examinations and oral examinations. kids are doing scientific examinations and research papers. teachers score those. they re part of the examination. an accountability, system. you ve got kids all across the country spending most of their time bubbling in. finding one answer out of five. rather than as we ve learned in the research, they re not doing science anymore in a lot of schools, not doing social studies, not doing writing. they re not doing debates or disgregss or investigations. they re not going to be competitive with others in the world because we re driving all of our effort around these high stakes tests. which are poor measures of the range of things that kids are learning elsewhere. i sew appreciate you setting it in a multinational context.
contributor ed rollins, he is a former deputy chief of staff to reagan and managed reagan s landslide reelection and major rolls in nine other presidential campaigns. ed, good to see you. your thoughts as we are getting these numbers and entrance poll numbers? the fascination paul has a great organization. he has been running for six years. romney has been a front-runner and has the same kinds of numbers four years when he got 30,000 votes, 29,000. santorum has caught this momentum. he has done what you traditional had to do in iowa, with no money and met the voters. he is the ultimate of retail. it s nice to see the three of the bunched here at the end of the day. three of them will go on. bottom tier will go on also i think for a very short period of time. the reality is that santorum has the conservative alternative. ron paul will stay in the race.
contributor ed rollins, he is a former deputy chief of staff to reagan and managed reagan s landslide reelection and major rolls in nine other presidential campaigns. ed, good to see you. your thoughts as we are getting these numbers and entrance poll numbers? the fascination paul has a great organization. he has been running for six years. romney has been a front-runner and has the same kinds of numbers four years when he got 30,000 votes, 29,000. santorum has caught this momentum. he has done what you traditional had to do in iowa, with no money and met the voters. he is the ultimate of retail. it s nice to see the three of the bunched here at the end of the day. three of them will go on. bottom tier will go on also i think for a very short period of time. the reality is that santorum has the conservative alternative. ron paul will stay in the race.
kids to tell us why in a starting point exclusive. plus, get real. we have not found any skeletons in rick santorum s closets. a lot of sweater vests. like a lot. facebook twit irpicked up on his wardrobe. if you don t believe me, we re going to show you the music video of the sweater vest. not kidding. a very busy two hours. besides michele bachmann and family, newt gingrich and his two daughters joining us. senator rand paul pitching for his father, and members of occupy iowa will be occupying the diner right here. so starting point begins right now. captions by vitac www.vitac.com a lot of heavy rockmusic this morning. good morning, everybody. you re looking at the waveland cafe. inside is where we are in iowa. the caucuses finally here, first ever the nation s caucuses. this is a horse race it s mitt romney leading by a nose. ron paul trying to mike it a photo finish. it s rick santorum surging from the rear and newt gingrich hedging his bets, admitting he may
syria. tell us what you know about where they went and what they re seeing. reporter: isha, we heard today they went to the city of homs where we heard reports of increasing violence, deaths and injuries the past few days. there were videos purporting to show members of the arab league in homs today. one video purports to show the head of the mission being shown remnants of weapons there by residents in the city. another video purports to show the members of the delegation there with residents of homs basically saying that they wanted the members of this league to go to other parts of the city to see some of the harder hit area. in that video you hear gunfire later on. we can t verify the authenticity of these videos, but they are corroborating what we re being told on the ground by eyewitnesss. mohammed, you mentioned gunfire on the video. what do we know about whether these clashes quieted down or how severe clashes were today in syria? again, we need to point out, the