I wrote letter 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 kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So 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 can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 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 five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And 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 to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did 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 still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could 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) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of 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 you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar 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 net 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 two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. 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 able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And 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, had some teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even 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 teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students 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 biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have 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 I 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 up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had 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 if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. 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 seem fair.
So, how 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 small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done 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 key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world 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 find out what they’re doing transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their 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 no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and 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 are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good 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 that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do 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 test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to 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 sort of in the 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 going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good 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 most 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 actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)