I wrote a letter last week about the 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 kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as 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 that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. 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 of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I 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 and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history 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 see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients 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 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. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It that 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 here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the 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 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 mosquitos that bite late night can’t get 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 a number of countries. It’s great to 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 eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually 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 the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has 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 new drug discovery going on. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the 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 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally 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 well. And the 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 the reason we’re successful. I say that, even 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 teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions 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 concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has 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 a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key 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 variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those 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 you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw 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 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 example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in 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 to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a 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 want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good 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, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in 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 some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it 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 of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people 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 make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — 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 system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)