I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to 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 a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next 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 diseases 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 how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for 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 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 man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the 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 of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of 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 people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going 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 road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies 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 that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand 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. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the 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, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions 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 the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we 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 science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who 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 was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we 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, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system 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 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 some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to 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 leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching 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 level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see 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 eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, we 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 a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And 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 book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually 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 recognize important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)