I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, 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 born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we 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 the only we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the 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 down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can 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 money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 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 evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you 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 burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going 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. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things 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. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d 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 teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure 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 strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 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 of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested 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 it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different 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 are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average 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 slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole 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 to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the 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 very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some 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 and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have 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 go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it 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 get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)