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 annual thing. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those 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. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that 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 thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it 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 happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is 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 northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into 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 been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by 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 it just 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 reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on 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 a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous 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 turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, 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 great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has 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 have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with 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 and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. 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 on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there 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 is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will 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 and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing 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 find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to 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? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching 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 Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors 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 rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you 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 a 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 that and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very 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 amount 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 running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And 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 come down here a year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York passed 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 optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. 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 something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If 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 the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make 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 getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)