I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more 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, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 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 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 those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. 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 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 and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things 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. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And 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 death rate did 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the 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 only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got 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 indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go a country with 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 world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two 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 get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand 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 that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to 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 of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers 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 the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even 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 a education. And we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate 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 a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference 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 those top quartile teachers. 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 quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The 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 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 are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the public 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 making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, 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 setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, 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 KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the 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 of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the 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 a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what 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, I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are 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 lives, if we get it right. I only had 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 very of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)