I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. 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 lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the 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 thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering 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 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 a 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 at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you 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 world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed 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. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, 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 Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 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 software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people 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 more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which 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 up and you vest 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 effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I 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 board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole 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 the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we 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 and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access 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 — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are 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 time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)