I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial 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 caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So 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. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have 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 disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much 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 a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut 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 and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with 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 of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay 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 going 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 to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the 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 to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And 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, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, 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 the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly 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 best in the world, if you measure them against the top 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 to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to 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 the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because 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 as as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if 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 have higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a 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 many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was 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 between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And 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 other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The 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. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is 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 past performance. There are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re 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 in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a 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 number times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of 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 working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I 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. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of as a personnel system, we can 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 it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future as should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it 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 at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its 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 out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)