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 honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan 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 the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And 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 the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have 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 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by 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 areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell 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 to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us 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 will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a 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 that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. 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 I’m a college 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 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 measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s 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 that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that 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 be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the 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 being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 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 four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or 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 things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making 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 one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that 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. Putting few cameras 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 clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news 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 here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get 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. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)