I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some 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 the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. 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 to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes 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 now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast 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 a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, 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 with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe 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 because the disease 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 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 at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be 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 eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have 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 to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now 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 like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say 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 fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of 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 you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever 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 getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that 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 variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be everyone 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 retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You 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 how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. 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 is associated with being better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw in 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 good teachers stay and 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, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example 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 schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, because might actually 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 it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that 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 opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to 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 place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it 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 to recognize how important is, and it really 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 you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)