I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And 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 people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million 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 I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop 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 we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. 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 from 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. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of 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 end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, 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 a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many 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 how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that 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 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 country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the 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 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 United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people 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 looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would 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 those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these 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 these are people 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 explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way 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 your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes 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 schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the — 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 and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They 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 teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public 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 something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those 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 take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much 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.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because 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 it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources 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 that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)