I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need 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 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 as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 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 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 disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and 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 the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is mother and child stay under the bed net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind 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 back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of 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 things. It involves communicators to 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. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like 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 with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. 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, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against 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 that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change 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 things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as 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 have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. 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 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 on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money to 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 effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what 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 the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools 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, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be 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 teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has 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 — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave 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 lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the 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 put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)