I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant 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 of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop 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 we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see people who lived 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 the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military 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. 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 is where the 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 most of the northern areas. And more 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 a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And you 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 we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have 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 communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second 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 spend a of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, 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 teachers in a 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 revolutions 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 the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And 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. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do 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 people working 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, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We 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 do look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal 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 of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job 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 a thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in 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 so by thinking of this 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 a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)