I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had 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 right things. And only by paying attention to these things and brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But 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 has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise 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 disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich 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 northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than 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, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time 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 transmitted 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 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 is mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you 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 careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road 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 how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the 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, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 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 year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for 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 in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are 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 high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was 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 constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them 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 actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who 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 the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those 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. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on 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 stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could 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 make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — 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 you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think education is the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And 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 naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)