I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I 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 people in to work on those problems, because I 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 to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of 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 two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly 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 code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It 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. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries are. So we can 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 most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies 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 experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds 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 this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all 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 reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in 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 U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so 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 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 for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking 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, 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 chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the 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 those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this 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 years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving 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 a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is 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 those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team 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 down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and 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 could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and review 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 access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — 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 what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)