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 annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising 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 under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich countries are. So we 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 to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those 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 malaria — 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 the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go 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 soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very 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 turn to 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 people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never 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 the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even 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 in United States, you have a 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 education better?
Now, 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 done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. 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 away. Within four years we 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 reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What 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, 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 four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates 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 data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 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, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a 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 teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And 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 testing going on, 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, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make 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 to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it really can make 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 see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)