I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in 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 majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is 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 can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is 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 a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar 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 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 two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give 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 social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand 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, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can 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 are fairly effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have 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 gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United 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, foundation, for the last nine years, has 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. A lot of these things had good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was 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 there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What 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 years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those 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. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The 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 four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring 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 almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than 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, 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 sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come 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 told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit 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 — this kid 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 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 who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in 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. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)