I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to 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 before dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children 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 childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked 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 that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was 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 it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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 around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people 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 night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through 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 a vaccine that’s going into three 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 new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very 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 important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason 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, 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. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We 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 the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that 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 the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to 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 in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we 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 is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance 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 us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in 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 retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has 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 Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because 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 a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the 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, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those 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, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic 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, gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it 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 is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be 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 are some clear 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 out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If 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 on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to 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 lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the 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 the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)