I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason 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 childhood deaths. As recently as 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 age 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 not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough to cut that 10 million in half again. And 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, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until 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 that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the 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 great tool. What 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 you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to 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 right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then 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 a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come 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 very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly 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. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the 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 is the education that the of people are getting. Not only has that been 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 so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less 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 that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people 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 more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers 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 is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. 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 be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for 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 back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect 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 pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get 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 a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re 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 very bizarre. I down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was 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 pay attention, nobody 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 compare to a normal 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 times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants 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 a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is 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 every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn 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 courses could 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 very best teachers. And so thinking of this as 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, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of 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 have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the 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 are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference 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 the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in 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 — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)