I wrote a 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 an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 a thing. (Laughter) And 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 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 course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium 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 bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut 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 — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you 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 period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention 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 vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. 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 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why 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 we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in 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 them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on 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 if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 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 compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working 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 studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve 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 thing, which says there’s no 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 you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great 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 public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy 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, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t 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 are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have 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 could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, 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.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name 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 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 you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)