I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor 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 it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to 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 years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when 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 with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and 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 only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put 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 been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when 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 have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get 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 the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will 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 into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds 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. Because the road map to get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s 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, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a 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 is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first 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 because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. 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. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a 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, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge 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 those is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit 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 to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, 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 engaged 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 needs to be involved. And KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve 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, we might actually fool 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 have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of 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 testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing 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 of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place 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 a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really 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 very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. 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 put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)