I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before 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 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 recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we 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 Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so 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 places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are 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 any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these 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 around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few 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 at night, so the 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 a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through 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 on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts 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. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of 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 worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so that have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority 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 of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how 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 in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That 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 are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, 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. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — to encourage the people with it to stay in 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 — where 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 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs 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 are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job 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, and there’s a 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 in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows 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 that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)