I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what 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, because I think there 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. only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children 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 were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million 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 vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and 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 been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who 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 the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich 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 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 the paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 that 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 in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the 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. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and 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. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it 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 to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on 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 we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And 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? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. 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 how 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 are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers 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 stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public 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 of increase.” They’re deeply engaged 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 was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting 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, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs 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 isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve 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, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think 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 of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the 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 actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a 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 book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to 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 for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)