I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is 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 years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 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. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did 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, U.S. and most of Europe 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 only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs 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 — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly 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 because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up 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 malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce 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 paid 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 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 tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous 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 second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And 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 the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these 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 up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For 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 and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it 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 leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving 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 teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in 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 in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP 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 will the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve 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. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it 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 it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right the country to have as strong a future as should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)