I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — 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 lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a 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 United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was 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 from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of 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 the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people 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 the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed 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 by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to 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 right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria 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 will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention 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 a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to 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 of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer 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 part of the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them 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 relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that 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 pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for 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 top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. 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? do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better 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. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want 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 are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not 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 things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — 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 a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had 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 very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)