I wrote a last 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 it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get 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 attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we 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 that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do 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. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can 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 much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths 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 in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll 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 new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a 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 map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that 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 kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so 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 the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And 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 done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out 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 top quartile? What do they look like? You might think 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 people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much 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 is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in 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 scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to 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 good they are. 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 advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the 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 going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of 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 I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a 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, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more 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 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 like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)