thanks how would you describe the state of education here brian ridge you see the statistics some say the native american high school dropout rate is like seventy percent while here on the plain ridge reservation it's runs pretty high when you have at one school school you may have one hundred fifty freshmen that enroll and they come to school and by the time that class is graduating you know four years down the road you're graduating maybe fifty sixty of those senior the seniors so you wonder you know where were they at you know so the high school dropout rate is still high. and what do we attribute that to as some of our kids still can't read the educational foundation is not as strong as it should be are we really preparing them to go out and are we are we preparing them to fail a lot of our kids and we do have a college here overall a quarter college but a lot of our students that register there they have to take remedial classes they take testing they do pre math testing then and they fall below the guidelines and so they're put into remedial classes and some of them feel what wo

the good news, brian, is we're going to start to see a shift in the current patterns. there's the polar vortex, the western ridge has been keeping the warm air in the west and the cold air here in the eastern half of the country, even up into alaska. but we will finally see the polar vortex moving north. the jet stream becomes more zonal. those are warmer winds from the pacific. and that means in the next 48 hours, everybody gets some relief. in fact, we're going to be talking, brian, about temperatures 10 to 15 degrees above normal for about 85% of the country. so there is some good news, we just have to hang on a little longer. >> al roker here with us in washington tonight. al, thanks, as always. >>> the president appears inside the capitol behind us here tonight to deliver his fifth state of the union. there's been advanced talk of bypassing congress on some measures, on what he'll say about the income gap and the minimum wage, and the speech to the nation comes as our new nbc news/wall street journal poll finds continuing deep pessimism across this country. let's go across town to our chief white house corr