I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I there 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 do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was 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 death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened 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. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. 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. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because 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 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 with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become 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 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, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of 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 involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems 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 with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even 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 States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, 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 a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if entire 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 in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people 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 slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest 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 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, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down 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 kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit 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 work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn 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 could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system 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 solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)