I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and 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 these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at 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 years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason 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 four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves 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 to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There 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 in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look 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 have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even 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 chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire 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 reward 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 absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their 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 and they’ve gotten 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 no 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. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that 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. And 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 the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes 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 the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work 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 take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by 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, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)