I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren had recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)