I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, 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 at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that 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 absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the 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 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 you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the 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 come up with few new 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 with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If 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 saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that 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 the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of 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, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college 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 students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 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 has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you 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 it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done 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 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is 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 are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world 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 what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this 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 variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you 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: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged 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?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, 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 to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the 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 data could not be available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of 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 saying that things are recorded 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 thought did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a 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 was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken out in the Senate 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 get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources 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, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)