I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing 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 had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more 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 before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were 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 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise 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. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked 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 the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe 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 paradox that because the disease is in 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 thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is 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 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 a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net 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 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 — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the 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 bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us 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 will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer 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 of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in 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 percent have been 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. at the forefront.
Now, the strength 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 if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and at the 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 covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number 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 had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a 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 it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But more we looked at 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 between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a 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 in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it 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 what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better 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 called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat 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 scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid 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 the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a 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 to block the data. For example, New 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 the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what 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 all public 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 I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses 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 very best teachers. so by 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, news reporter, wrote — 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 into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and 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)