I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some 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 people in to 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, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children 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 them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is 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 under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how 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. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And 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 early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the 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 of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 thing. (Laughter) And 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 million people at any 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 by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people 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 are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor 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 we 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. And you end up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need 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 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 second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part 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 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 percent of 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 to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that have equal opportunity. We 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 the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For 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 a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education 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 scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those 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 skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and 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 — few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is 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 poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And 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, you 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 thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, 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 classroom — 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 making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And 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 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, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get 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, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)