I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at 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 were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived 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 disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most 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 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 put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in 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 experience 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) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world 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 going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves 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 know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these 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 say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as 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 less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve 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 some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, 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 need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for 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 gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because 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 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 very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of one 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 those 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 of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When 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 running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. 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 and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could 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 optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and 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 little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important to get right 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 money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are 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 — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)