I wrote a letter last week talking about the 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. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these 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. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly 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 look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease 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 that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring 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 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 areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so 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 mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child 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 and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a 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 to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the 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 the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we 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 the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout 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 than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, 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 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 best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What 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 go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They 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 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 saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is 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?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is 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 classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in 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 things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what 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 is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit 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 — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is the most 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 in it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets 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 private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)