I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there 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, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that 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 were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and 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. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used 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 that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And 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 rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put 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 priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a 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 holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only 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 a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite 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 you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where 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 death rate will soar back up again. And the has 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 foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the 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 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 social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We 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 governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had 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. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 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 revolutions in software 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 balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make 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, 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 very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a 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 top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to 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 must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is 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 second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers 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, there are a places — 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 thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally 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 on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position of the kid 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, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, 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 that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot 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, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom 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 well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have 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 only available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good 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 really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can 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 make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)