I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: 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 really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in 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 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 a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was 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. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year 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 in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor 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 be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a with the right 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 you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, 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 has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those 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 concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts 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 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 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 four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how 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 schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer 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 must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not 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 do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and 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 stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. 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 — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to 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 years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be available and used in the tenure decision 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 of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I 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 of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — 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 teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these 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 things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)