I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think 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 the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of 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 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? 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 deadly that’s spread 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 who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at 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 mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened 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, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a 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 at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are 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 child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the 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. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts 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 alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug 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 able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all 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, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had 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 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United 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 you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the 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 in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten 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, the way the pay system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the 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 want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told 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 once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic 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 now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it 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 thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)