I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before 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 key reason we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For 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 in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is 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 afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could 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 great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in 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 need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 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 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 people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. 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 takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who 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 who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter 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 kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in 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 rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom 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 be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should 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 this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense 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 money education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)