I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So really can make changes. The next breakthrough 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 severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military 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 death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 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 recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 rich are afflicted. And so 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. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we 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 eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and 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 that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. 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 the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep 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 is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that have 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, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from 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 United States, you have a 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 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 effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those 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 skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for 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 gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good 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 few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example 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, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those is 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 teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun 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 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 need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the 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 could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of 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, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best 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 have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken 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 get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)