I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things 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 two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million 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 10 million 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 brings us 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 of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually 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 was 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 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 patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is 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 why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get 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 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 in aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would 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 important. Well, all 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 reason we’re successful. I 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 set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. 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 and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are 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 do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in 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 caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one 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 the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — 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 kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And 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 principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It 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 is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)