I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems 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. And only by paying attention to these things and brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason 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 were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we 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 disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the 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 nets are a great tool. What 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 when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind 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 has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different 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 would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had 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 say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so 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 pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids 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 year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 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 degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. 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 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 a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost 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 it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on 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 needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a 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 principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need let us 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 in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down 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 — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. 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 involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)