I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average 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 died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the 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 were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And 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 to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is 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 who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what 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 still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into a with 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, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through 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 discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would 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 is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great 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 good education. And those 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 keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the 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 pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of getting 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 in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What 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 away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is 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 majoring 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 what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good 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 high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good 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, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a 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 number times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test 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 data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot 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, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we 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 people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You 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 its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)