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