I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over 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 of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million 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 of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated 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 of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only 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 bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now 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 ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should 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 road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a 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 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 gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done 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 degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the 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 a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is 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 paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to 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 limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management 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 job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement 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 think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)