I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet 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 in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important 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 things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of 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 we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money 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 priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. 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 by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you 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 not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos 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 be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve 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 do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria 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 rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and 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 for 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 second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of 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 of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can 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. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a 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 revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so that have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids 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 compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 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 a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a 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 in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top 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 the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not 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 Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect 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 up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra 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. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that 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 the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They 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 different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to 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 cameras in the classroom saying that 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 little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this 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 good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these 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 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 more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required 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 with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)