I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what 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, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other 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 where they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more 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 the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 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 was eliminated from all the 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 of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. 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. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam 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 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 and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a 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 has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part 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 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. 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 better education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish 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 the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine 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 of these things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is 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 four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. 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 rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers 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 almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole 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, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because might actually fool you, and try and do a 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 of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — 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 this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future as should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the 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. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into 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 great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)