I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of 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 reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise 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 severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other 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 rich countries are. we 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 northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets 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 of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the 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, 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 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 starts in a couple months. And that should save over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success 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 how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that 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 is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can 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 of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a 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 now people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and 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 up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as 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 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 over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have 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 to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, 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 on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of 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 up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 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 four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might 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. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you 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 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 to block the data. For example, New York passed a law said that the teacher improvement data could not be available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. 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 where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame 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 very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people — 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)