I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was 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 market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And 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 childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 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 in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those 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 that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could 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 few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor 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 be 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 up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then 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 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 new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer 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 all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, 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 States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you 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 small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people 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. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — 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 the whole spirit attitude 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, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I 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 something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to 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 making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing 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 the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things 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 them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers 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, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work 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 teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a future as should have. In fact we have 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 are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, 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 lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)