I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren 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 in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before 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 past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So 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 the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 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 for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which is how do 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 of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things so 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 poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those 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 net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the 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, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And 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 that the country is 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. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last 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 good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? 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 is very, very small. You might think these are 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 effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers 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 done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, 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 and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, 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 in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that 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, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice 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, can 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 who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a 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 of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some 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 them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have 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 could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of 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 Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are 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 its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)