I wrote a letter last week 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, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of 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 lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable 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 brings us to the 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 this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or 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. So we see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe 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 this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around 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 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 indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become 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 can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get 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, 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 how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need 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 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 question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 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 to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the 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 now to people with 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 strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the 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 of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the 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 years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing in 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 out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being 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 that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of 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 graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal 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 these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just 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 a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees 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 assign that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access 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 place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the 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 money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important is, and it really can make a difference for of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the 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. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s 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, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)