I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some 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 to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before 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 key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid 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 terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated 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. and most of have gotten 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 to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies 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 those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What 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. when 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 mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a 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 tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding 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 save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have 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 the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why 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. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven 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 took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared 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 had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than 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, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these 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 much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the 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 giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For 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 to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to 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 the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does 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 of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working 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 testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to 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 and saying that things being 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 little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much 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 a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to 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 for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think 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 like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just 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 these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)