I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people 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 not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to 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 of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over 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 the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now 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 doable in 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 to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we 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 the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by 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 going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past eventually become 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, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back 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 vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to 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 make a teacher great? It seems 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 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 in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s 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 in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is 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 kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount 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 on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid 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, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip 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 have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a 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 news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are 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 we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)