I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, 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 people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where 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 I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. 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 of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies 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 you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not 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 mother and child stay under the bed net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with 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. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for 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 has gone through this where it paid attention and 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 starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding 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 these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It 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 why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of 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 teaching system has worked 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 in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on 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 balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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 a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher 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 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 having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test 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 go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says 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. 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 better teacher. 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 very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might 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 it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot 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 classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good 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 I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had 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 things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — 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)