I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important 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 and having people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share 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. part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to 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, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop 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 genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused 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 in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child 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 nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and 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 going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very 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 to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It like 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 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 reason we’re here today, part of 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 system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective 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 best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront 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. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked 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 with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the 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 the of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are 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.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten 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 no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay 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 few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit 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 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 and I thought, “What is 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, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody 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 limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management 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 good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to 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 passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, 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 to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. 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 clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody 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 book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a 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 here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right the country to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in 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 people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make 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 see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and 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)