I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was 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, the market does drive the scientists, the 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 this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic 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 a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was 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 it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate 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, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has 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 going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come 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 deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we 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 how these tools combine and work together. Of 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 be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m 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. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people 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 that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that 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 in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these 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 they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in 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 stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — 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 is different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first 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 on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the 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, in a normal school, aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the — 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 them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital 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 schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these 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. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)