I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress as need 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 to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is 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 the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop 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 look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at 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 United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So 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 most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention 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 a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that 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: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And 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 wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the 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 you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished 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 over 50 percent. And even if graduate from 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 higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math 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 nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the 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 with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools 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 take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit attitude in those schools is very different than in normal 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 teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to 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 is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who 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 the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure 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 lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And 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 gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other 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)