I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think 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 malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this 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 severe 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 bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was 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, 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 only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this 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 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug 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 to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, 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 a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because 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 dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has 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 lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is 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 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve 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 effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was 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 through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are 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 thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very 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 them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that 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 a personnel system, we can 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 good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it 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, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)