I a 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. A I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking 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 born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was 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 northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich 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 any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could 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) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you into 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 shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation backed 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 map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to 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 than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely 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 done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single 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 are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does 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 four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports 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 the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. 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 on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future 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 these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had 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 these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in 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, 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)