I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual 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, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now 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? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we 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 look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we 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 more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things 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 the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor 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. And nets are a great 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 spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go 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 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 drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, 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 today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And 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 and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not 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 change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how 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 and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate 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 in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there 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. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between 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 those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. 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 system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are 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 goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And 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 told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They 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 be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite 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 us the picture of where we are. And that allows us 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 on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few 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. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit 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 great courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)