I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. 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 died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that 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 can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it 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 so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So 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 gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in 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 attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of 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 this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot 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, had some teachers. We all 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 I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students 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 create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered 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 taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And 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 schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more 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 quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing 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 those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And 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 are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. 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 that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way 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. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very 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. means 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 their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 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 that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying 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 of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we 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 cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the 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 not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the 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 good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)