I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was 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 those problems, because I there are some very 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 other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years 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 childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And 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 eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently 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 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 one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a 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 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 in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be 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 choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in 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 that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of 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 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 scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to 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. 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, 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 on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us 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 college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do 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 having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and 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 they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay 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 teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers 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 draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the 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 good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually 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 the data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are 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 allows 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. Putting a few cameras in the and saying 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 I did 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 sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)