I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the 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 children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently 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. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll 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 only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked 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 the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of 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 leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money 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, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now 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 up with two choices. If 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 the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going 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 to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug 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 be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and 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 education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a 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 things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number started 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 of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to 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 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the 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 things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom 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 performance their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your 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 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 people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers 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 — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They 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 different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving 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 in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 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, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — 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 of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The 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 year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in 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 a thing of trying to block the data. For example, New 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 working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the 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, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most 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 for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re 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 it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take 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 of it.
Thank you. (Applause)