I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is 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 those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this 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 look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the 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 the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you 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 that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. 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 have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every 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 the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the 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 up again. the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three 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 have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the 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 need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn 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 the kind of question that people would spend a lot 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 us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We 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 a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a 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 look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people 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? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — 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 top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer 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 like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means 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 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 in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone 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 does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we might 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. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those 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 and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the 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. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people involved — 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)