I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I 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. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan 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 age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to 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 history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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 of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it 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 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 got bed nets. bed 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 at 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 now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. 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 the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this 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 going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the 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. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the 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 nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded 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 that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and 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 reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into 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. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost 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 say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take 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 constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying 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. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only 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 have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of 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. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — 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 time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into 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. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)