I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood 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 breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop 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 look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was 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 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 with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why 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 have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools 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 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 rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to 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 keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be 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. And the answer is, really, that 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 of 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 fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really only 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 have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the 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 was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to 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 the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that great 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 within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that 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. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten 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 effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the 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 them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find 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 in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is 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 you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could 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 have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, 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 everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are 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. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required 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 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)