I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not 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 in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason 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. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. 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 it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s 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 disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It 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 it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring 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 the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So 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 around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And 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 means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I 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) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have 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 two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you 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 time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these 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 high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use 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 rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that 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 wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college 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 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to 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 pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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 degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher 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, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people 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 we at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are 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 that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone 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 out what they’re doing 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? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation 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 different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the 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 is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight 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 done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those 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, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going 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. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to 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 how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure for the 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 of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture 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, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by 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. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a 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 because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions 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 excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)