I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, 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 an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died 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 matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back 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 diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia 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 this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved 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. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating 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, which is where 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 can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why 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 time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies 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 let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past 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. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And 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 the map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in 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 that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate 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, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching 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 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 there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay 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 teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates 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 their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to 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, it will the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only 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 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 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, think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going 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 those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers 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 watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a 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 into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle 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 you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)