I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress 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 those 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 looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the 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 few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is 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 those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease 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, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in 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 let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number 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 had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the 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 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 starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get rid 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 to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re 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 the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength 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 weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad 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 started senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was 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 less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have 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 you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up some 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 quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — 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 difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in the world 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. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching 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 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 a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable 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 and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these 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, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that 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 a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this 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 as 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 are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. 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 these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)