I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by 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 of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking 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 died before the of 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 a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and 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? Well there’s only a few that account for 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 do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have 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 the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men 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 in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get 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 a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in 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 that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the 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 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 drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. 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 that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for 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 the were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even 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 education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working 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, more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very 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 gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to 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 majoring 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 study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are 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 — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re 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 teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, 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 scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not 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 there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of 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 to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of 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 these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)