I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 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 of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which 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. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. 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 man figured out 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 the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And 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 rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get 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 men are afflicted. 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 one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are 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 the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get 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 disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should 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 map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools 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. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we 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 great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had 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 say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 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 starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always 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 where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you do of 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 on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the 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 their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between 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, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation 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 says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is 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 master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — 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 the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where 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 — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on 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 those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which 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 those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few 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 something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has 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 KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you 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 education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really 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 — 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. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)