I wrote a letter last week talking about work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit 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 lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what 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 most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more 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 more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas 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 those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and 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 vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand 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 optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now 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 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 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 the we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the 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 for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science 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 covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared 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 to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as 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, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a 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 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 quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they 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 not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is with being a better teacher. Teach 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 are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the 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 places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare 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 limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone 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 country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it 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 that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at 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. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)