I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of 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 but 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 is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid 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. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has 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 local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to 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 the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make 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 the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the 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, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it 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 high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking 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 to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine 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. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on 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 teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which 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. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the 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 better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are 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 thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I 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 up on the 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, gets to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the 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 testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could 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 take those great courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are 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 of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)