I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death 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 few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And 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 that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man 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. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, 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 a few new things. We’ve got 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 can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get 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 those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds 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 the road map to rid of this disease involves many 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 the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the 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 teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a 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 stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished 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 soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem 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 small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And 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 can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a 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 on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team 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 deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and 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 to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a 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, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money 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 beginning to recognize how important this is, and it 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 — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very 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 naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, 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)