I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died 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 of two 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 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 as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The 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 few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man 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 quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see 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. 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 at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s 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 bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If 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, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within years we would be blowing everyone 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 retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high 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 to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching 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?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school 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 have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to 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 once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed 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, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind 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 so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a 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 to right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken in 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 of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system 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 things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)