I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some 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 things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age 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 were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths 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 under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a 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 the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can 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 much investment. For 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 been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a 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 indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw 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 will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it 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 vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility 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 understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would a lot 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 great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students 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 to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking 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 than 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked 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, the more realized that having great teachers 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 there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not 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 quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That 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 are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. 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 is and to draw in and 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 teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. 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 schools is 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 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 going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be 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 the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video 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 public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have 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 everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel 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 so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the most thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I 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, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. 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 great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)