I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has 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 — and less 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 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 million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial 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 United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it 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 of the northern areas. And 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 put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible 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 greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium 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 a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when 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 the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug 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 these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not 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 to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us 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 a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It 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 with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent 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 in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade 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 you look at the economy, it really is only providing 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 driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished 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 stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we 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 best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect 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 up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past 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 with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on 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 good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those 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 to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So 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 to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement 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 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 of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what 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 down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn 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, these free courses 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 the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just 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 make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to 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 that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)