I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to 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 of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more 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 age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now 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 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 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 history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the 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 eliminated from all 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 of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time 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, so you could 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 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 it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because — 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 choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding 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 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 the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some 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 say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting 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 opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 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 year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We find 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 of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And the answer 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 people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and 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 system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is 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 associated being a better teacher. Teach 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 at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number 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 just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows 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 classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can 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 you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a 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 was fantastic. It gave you a sense 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 the important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to 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 these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)