I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems 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 attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people 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 that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 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 that I’ll this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated from all 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 of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And 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 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. 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t 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 starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because 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, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as 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 equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this 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 though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the 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 was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if 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 chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has 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 of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And you’d say, “Wow, we should reward 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 look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different 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, way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave 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 set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking 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 going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle 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 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 into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the 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 in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in 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 clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make 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 watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)