I wrote a letter last week talking about the 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 annual thing. A goal I had there was to more people in to work on those problems, because I think there some 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 paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking 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 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first 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 severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all 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 man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten 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 into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by 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 mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it 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 those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention 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 that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two 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 road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part 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, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning 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 now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and 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 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a 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 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 many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no 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. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 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 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 teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is on?” The teacher was running 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 attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping 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 be there. 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 told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and 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. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” 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 great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid 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 the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It 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 think that education is the most 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 had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get 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)