I wrote letter last 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, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who 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 problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at 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 were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 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 to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles 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 think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do 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, if we look the genetic 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 bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos 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. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over 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 this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And 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 a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set 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 them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have 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 are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done 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 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And 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 many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized 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 quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a 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 we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these 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. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors 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 rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They 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 in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed 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 about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more 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, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you 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 of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these 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 to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)