I wrote a letter last week talking about the 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 kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems 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 to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — 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. Each one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising 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 make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. I 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 us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos 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 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 have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. when you use indoor 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 have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot 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. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part 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, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are 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 of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even 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, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do 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 small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based test 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 years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught 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 back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way 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 good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay 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. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports 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 people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare 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 limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of 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, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could make 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 as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its 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 with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)