I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being 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 in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant 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 problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more 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 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really 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 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 stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It 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. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was 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. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more 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. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little 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 nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so 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 in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back 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 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 should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things 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 generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we 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 seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you 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 for those top 20 percent is starting to on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if 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 jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and 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 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us 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 teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That 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 things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers 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 almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and 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 are a places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly 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 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 on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good 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 they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of 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 decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a 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 clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them that 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 the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it 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 thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things 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 with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)