I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe 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 a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease 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 British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death 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. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the 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 thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate 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 going because just 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 the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few 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 you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by 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 and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay 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 phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to 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 the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug 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 will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot 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 great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent 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 revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as 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 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the 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 these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. 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 that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top 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 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 gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two 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 with being better 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 this. And we’ve done almost 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 slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see 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 years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and 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 block data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we 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 Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how 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 more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)