I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some 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. goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 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 rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the 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 are a tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep 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 in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world 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 eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of 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 great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the 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 a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and 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 education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate 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. But most 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. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do 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, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing 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 should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are 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 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 they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a 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 is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes 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 in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running 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 bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be involved. And 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 data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going 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 out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and 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 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 you could them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I 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 system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)