I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we 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. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and 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 to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority 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 history of this 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 in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate 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. and most of have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible 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 people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come 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 at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can 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 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 has 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 trial starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives 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 rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you 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 with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For 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 of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last 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. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening 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. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with 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. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different 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 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. sat down 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 teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to 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 it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need notice to do that. So imagine running a factory 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, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a 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 to block the data. For example, New York passed 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 working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and 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 so who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 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 — 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 good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really 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 — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more 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 system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)