I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the 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 had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, 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 than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half 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 the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when 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 treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 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 northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So 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 way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And 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. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save 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 the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these 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 this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and 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 balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 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 who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was 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 less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — over 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 entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing in 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. We should find out 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 these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. 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 do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money to 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 some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to 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 bad 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 — great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was 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 middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice 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 in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, 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 working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques 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 practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And 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 going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. 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 threatened 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 lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are 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 naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)