I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, I 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 by 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 these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less 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 rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the 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, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently you 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 put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. means 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 poor people 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 great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. 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 foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand 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 had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set 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 and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before 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. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And 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 are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their 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 and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being better 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 people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — 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, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a 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 is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to 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 come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what 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 and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a 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 send everyone 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 country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required 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 people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)