I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, 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 having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit 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 century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before 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 able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And 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 do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have 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 it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where 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 going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save 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 the 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 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 Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this 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 say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone 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 starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you 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 people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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 a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we 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 best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years 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, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not 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. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no 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 past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, 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 is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude 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, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one 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 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, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or 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 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 — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have 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 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 some clear 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 what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all 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 clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 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 on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we 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 future it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened 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 get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, 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 to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)