I wrote a letter last week talking about work of 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 of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into 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 way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at 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 five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to 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 majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if 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 million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the 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 with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little 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 nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug 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 alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know 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, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn 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 like the of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a 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 the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change 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 and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. 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 graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working 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, the we realized that having great teachers was the very 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 quartile. How much 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 of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill 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 these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody 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 their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public 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 increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” 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 in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and 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 do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite 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 on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind 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 that kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available 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 of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a 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 into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these 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 can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. 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 resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)