I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well 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 this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the 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 things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And 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 a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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 equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people 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. it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 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 and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw 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 will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in 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 turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this is 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 the reason 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 a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things 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 the dropout rate as the number who started in year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher 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, foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having 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 there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What 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 in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality 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 takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being 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 who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers 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 schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the 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 to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you go and 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. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data 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. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have 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, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on 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 I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that 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 that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 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, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that 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 the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, 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 more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)