I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right 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 morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — 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. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a 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 a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And 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 until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the 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 happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million 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 bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when 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 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 into a with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It 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 this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. 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 percent been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. have to 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 advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking 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 degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last nine years, has 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 of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having 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 schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that 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, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart 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 is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good 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 very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good 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, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the 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 taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit 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. 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, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a 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 the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need 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, you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and 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 could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought 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, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have 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 are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, 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 lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)