I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives 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 four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 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 to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we 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. 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 deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 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 most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused 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 back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention 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 a vaccine that’s into phase 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 have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because 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 success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. 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. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that 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 to change this. We have to change it so people have 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, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the 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 on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom 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 performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four 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. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no 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 second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very 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 with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go 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, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see 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 engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare 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 number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made and used 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 some clear things we can 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 out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something 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. can take the very best 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 them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education 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 the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it 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. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it 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 just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)