I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — 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 problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to 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, think it can 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 the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a 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 Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So 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 early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So 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 of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with 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 bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine 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. 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 many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of 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 teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more realized that 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 — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within years we would be 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 those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality 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 effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly 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 making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see 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 school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position 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 school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good 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 to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to 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 the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working 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 given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down 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 that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have 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 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 of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it 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 recognize how 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 problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are 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 resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)