I wrote a letter week talking about the 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 thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines 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 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the 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 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 the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was 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 gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up 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 up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going 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 new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need 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 come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally 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 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, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the 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 the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are 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 a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so 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 science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 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 of getting 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 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 up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world 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 find what 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 very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being 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 some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the 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 data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount 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. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged 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. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number 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 workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very 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 you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s 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 gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t 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 brilliant people like you to 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 will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)