I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention 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 two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that 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 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 gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the 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 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 of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into 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. Over 200 people 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 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 poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets 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 night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a 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 question that people would a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the 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 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 great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set 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 them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people 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 was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took 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 dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that 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 completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have 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, 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 things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we 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 is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 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 difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in 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 those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with 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 better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which 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 that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might 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 block 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 so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there 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 us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I 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 best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to 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 for country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for 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 is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — 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 system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)