I wrote a letter last week talking 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 thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there some 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 the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the 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 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. 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 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds 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 a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a tool. What it 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. when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you 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 a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the 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, we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend 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 a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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 of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And 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 answer 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 teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for 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 their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra 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 majoring 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 and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good 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, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the 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 which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and 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 the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we 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 to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit 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 all and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and 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 know you could them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that 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 to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these 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 helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)