I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of 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 it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died 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 a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and 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? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of 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 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 only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And 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 the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most 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 the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I 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 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 child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back 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 net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into 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 have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be 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 second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, 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, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to 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 getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior year 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 dropout rate as soon as that 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 a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a 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 invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded 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 realized that 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 — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And 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 that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. 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 this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good 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 high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — 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 and attitude in those schools is very different than in the public 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 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 I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher 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 block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I 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 can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the 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, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only 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 sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)