I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other 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 where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is 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 the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which 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 at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all 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 a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the 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, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of have gotten rid of 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 only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs 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 greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed at 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 of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and 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 disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this 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, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone 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 even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things 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 up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. 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 and 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, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom 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 rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — what goes 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 very different than 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 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 was 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 constantly scanning to which 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 in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that 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. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted 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 and them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that 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 were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the 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 really think education is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, 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 can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame 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 the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)