I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has 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 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 of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters 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 was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one 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 course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death will soar back up again. And the world has through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these 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 to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we 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 like the kind of question that people would spend a lot time on, and we’d understand very well. And the 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. all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at 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 balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of 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. even if you graduate 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 do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested 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 things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. 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 two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be 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 those people. We should find out what they’re doing transfer that skill 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 is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect 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 pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. 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, raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and in those schools is very different than in the public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it 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 imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just 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 in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of 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 good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who 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 had time to frame those two problems. There’s a more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)