I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines 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 breakthrough 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 diseases that 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, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a 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 with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the 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 most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money 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 million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I 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 few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now 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 past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, 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 disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save over 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. 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. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. 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. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might 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, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people get 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 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 replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set charter schools 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, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude 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, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody 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 that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a 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 in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are 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, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them 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 so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re 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 it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)