I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not 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 and draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the 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 only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial 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 States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of 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 reason only poor people should 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 a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And 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 we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going 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 high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this 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 here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 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 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 so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and it 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 was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the 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 things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we 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, we should reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening 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. 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 back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and 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 system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle 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. the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and 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 down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher 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 to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of 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 how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing 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, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and 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)