I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal 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 not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think 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 look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of 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. And I think that’s doable in well 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 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 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 can that people 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 disease 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 that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And 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. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where rich countries are. So we can 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 most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For 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. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things 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 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 bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves 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 a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the 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 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. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, 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 people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, 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, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had 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 students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like 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 up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the who started in senior year and compared it to the 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 soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 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. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, 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 things in libraries. A lot of these things had good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can 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. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a 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 at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage 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 better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. 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. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was 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 to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that 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 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 are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come the 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 know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things 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 them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I 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 very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by 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 was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who 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 difference for millions lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these 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 put its resources 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 up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)