I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, 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 of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make as 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 those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 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, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem 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 disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at 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 in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. 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. so that’s why 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe 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 into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t 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 a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do 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 these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful 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. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best 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. 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 only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a 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 things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first 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 the dropout rate as the number 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 soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to 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 the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — 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 we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should 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 characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes 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, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving 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 measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad 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 are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is set 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 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 attitude 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 this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, 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 kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the 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 the principal come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available 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 picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so 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, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)