I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments 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 problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it 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, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were 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 of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of 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 paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into 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 — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 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 holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s 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, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through 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. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should 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 road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to 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 generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like 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 with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had 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 if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our 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 things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in 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 should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second 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 majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The 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 KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is 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 in 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 teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat 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 was constantly scanning 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 those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times 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, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is 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 who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill 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 right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people 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 things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)