I wrote a letter last week talking about the 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, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to 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 things. And only by paying attention to these things and 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 share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to 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 history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the 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 figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was 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 was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could 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 are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you do 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, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the 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 the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give 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 that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to 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 of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in 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 forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade 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 at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as 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. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from 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 United States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked 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, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. 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. How much 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 on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile 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. All you are those 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 doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average 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?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They the 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 than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it 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 they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who 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 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 working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how 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 everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only 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 can the very 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 on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a 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 money education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there 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 had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle 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 into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)