I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to 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 governments do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress 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 an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — 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 were to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us 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 the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the 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. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where 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 rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have 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 a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So 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, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid 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 a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can 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 top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as as 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 than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested 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 these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the 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 should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the 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 extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are 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 average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and 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 going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which 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 and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it 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 compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being 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 thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so 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 going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free 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 get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these 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 come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)