I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there 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. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, 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 to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was 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 areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get 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 has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million 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, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason 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 and child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful 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 up with two choices. If you go into a with the right 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 eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention 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 over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of 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, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 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 revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the 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 people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they 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 soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a 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, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single 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 years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the 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 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, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those 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 to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and 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 teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only 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 that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you 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 book actually, about KIPP — the 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 sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — 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)