I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 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, — and less than 10 million of 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 one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the 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 severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated 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 of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently 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. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than 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 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 is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should 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 it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — 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, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and 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 into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we 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 will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, 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. 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 college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior 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 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, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the 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 that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer 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 — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving 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 teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the 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. Everybody needs be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a 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 a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the 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 decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And 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 it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments 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 brilliant people like to study these 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)