I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren 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 people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive 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 other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before 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 way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan 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 age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The 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 majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe 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 the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies 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 roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late 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 be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in 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 this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And 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, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a of 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 some great teachers. We all had a 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 great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people 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 at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation 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 of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The 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 are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to 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 principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some 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, we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for 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 can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being 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 I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very 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 that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of 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 that education is most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the because 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 difference for millions lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)