I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A 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 market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the 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 these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 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 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 it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the 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 those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you 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, 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. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a 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 had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people 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 that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they 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 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And 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 that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked 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 there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what 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 this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their 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 four different 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 works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you 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 people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could 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, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on 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 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 you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — 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 make 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 like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)