I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some 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 paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I 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 look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years 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 of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which 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 for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 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 leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it 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 that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly 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 because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you 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 to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country the right 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 go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death 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 upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if 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 to the funding high, to 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 combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It 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, of us here, I’ll bet, had 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 I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the 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 of 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 we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the 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 in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you 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. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these 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 do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, 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 who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” 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 being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them 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 you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher 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 important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into 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 with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)