I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So 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 problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way 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. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently 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 diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that 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 the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more 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 much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are 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 million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I 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 have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with 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 that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but 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 on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery 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 of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course 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 we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a 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 college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them the 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 those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning 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 with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change so that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than 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 schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and 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 class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think 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 do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no 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 pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in 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 it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the 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 example of one 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. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit 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, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level 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 attention, which 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 — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, 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 test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there 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, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them 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 anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — 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 good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in 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 make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)