I wrote a last week talking 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 I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think 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, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children 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 before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I 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, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to 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 the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich countries are. So we can 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 the northern areas. And more 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. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the 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 will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, 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, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was 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 they always the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United 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 last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase 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, 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 quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these 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 that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with 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 leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — 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 involved. And so KIPP is doing 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. In the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure 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 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 allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best 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 this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you 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 education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the 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 like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)