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