I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest 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 are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look 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 them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters 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 back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only 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. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in the 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 terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has 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 in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use 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 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 two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding 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 couple months. that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get 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 these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason 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 teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if 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 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, our foundation, for 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 things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the 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 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 tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are 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 think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different 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 the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the normal 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 you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the 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 setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a 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 the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to 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, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — 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 lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in 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 who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take people like you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)