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