I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important 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 by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to 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 born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died 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 we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is 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 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 people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate 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 of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because 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 deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number 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 eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a 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 college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong 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 things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance 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, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But 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 between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That 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 everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and 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, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring 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 people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set 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 is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, 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?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a 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 test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, 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 of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in 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 are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick 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 you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)