I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want 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. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that 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, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in 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 was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. 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 rich countries are. So we 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 most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For 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. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just 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 little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What 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 when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool 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 local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And should 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. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte 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 generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this 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 today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even 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 teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they 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 over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much 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 your 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: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they 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, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be available and used in 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 can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find 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 very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it 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 a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have 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 people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I 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 at the name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other involved — and 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)