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 an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to 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 as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several 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 over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. 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 was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to 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 the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re 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 two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to 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. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need 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, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very 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 had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced 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 always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout 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 chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail 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 last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us 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, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no 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 goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math 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 draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude 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 saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m 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 the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the 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 of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And 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 let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take 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 so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would 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, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of 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 — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken in the 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 we get right. I 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 required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)