I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So 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 disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And 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 people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just things 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 the auditorium a little 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 bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number 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, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone 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, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. 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 though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective 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 them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And 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 people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance 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 years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught 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 back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to 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 and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some 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. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these 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 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 the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to 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, will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one 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 the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the 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 a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is 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 it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can a 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, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally 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 people like 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 things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)