I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who 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 I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the 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 two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently 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 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 problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop 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, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So 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 recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put 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 greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get 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, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And 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 with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves 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 the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the 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 had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have 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 in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And 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 so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise 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 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top 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 quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality 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 and 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 the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is 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 are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and 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 a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I 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 scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole 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 in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a 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. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought 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, I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in 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 come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)