I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what 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, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive 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 people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into 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 more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each 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 back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases 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 is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the 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) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you 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 it is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of 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 these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies 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 able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot 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 some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, 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 fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And 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 have higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years 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 reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at 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 up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad 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 are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools 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 teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those 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 down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the 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 board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does 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 need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and 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. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision the 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 testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I 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 the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the 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 courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at 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. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)