I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the 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 people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, 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 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 that account for vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop 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, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where rich countries 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 most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the 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 that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are 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 net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If 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 time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial starts in a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many 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 get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand 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 these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, 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 effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the 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 of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first the statistics, I was 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 who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had 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. And even you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire 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 those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. 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 things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a 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 some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 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 is very different than in 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 engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay 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 KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the 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 of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great 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 know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have 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 for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who 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 we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)