I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem 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 severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. 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 it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it 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 of Europe have 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 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 put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted 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 no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it is the 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 indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful 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 you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these 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 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 say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that would 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 of 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 great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So 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 for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the 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 opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it 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 and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking 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 ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in 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 these things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And 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 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 top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded 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 of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)