I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. 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, the 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 as much as we 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 to admit that I am 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 past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So 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? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and 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 history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several 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 British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can 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 investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going 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 around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the 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 and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if 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 rate will 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 going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should 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 us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would a lot 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. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. 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 look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had 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. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things 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 hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing 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 they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain 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 is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The 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 in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and 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 stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving 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 sit in one of 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 sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the 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, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and 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 things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very 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 physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a 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 to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only 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 at 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. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)