I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was 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 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 other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan 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 died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and 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 phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used 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 that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so 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 up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple 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 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 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 in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, 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 of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow 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 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 for those 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 opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the 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 before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance 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, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — to encourage the people with it 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 very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in 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 fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to 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 the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job 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 whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. 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 given us the of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, 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 in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. 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 in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)