I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going 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 very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died 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 those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread 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 the disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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 most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from 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 transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that 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 to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar 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 is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how 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 as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part 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 great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system 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 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the other 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 the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took 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 dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our 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 libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in 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 go away. Within years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you 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 happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does 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 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, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to 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 effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of 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 is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit attitude in those schools is very different than in 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 this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit number of times the principal can come into the classroom — 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 only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do good 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 thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s 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 that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. 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 clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at 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. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time 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. And the skill 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 right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)