I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to more people in to work on those problems, because I think are some 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 these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much 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 of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or 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 rich 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 of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the 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 up with a few 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 that late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have 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 choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up 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 funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation 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 it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. 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 we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte 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 these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. 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 have been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the 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 balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We 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 I first the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they 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 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. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem 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. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is 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 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 high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit 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, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of 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 sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth 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 to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a 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 — sometimes to once per year. And they need notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that 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 a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. 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 us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you 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, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a 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 have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it 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 important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like 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)