I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being 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 on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that 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 a severe 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 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 in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, 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, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than 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 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 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 not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying 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 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 with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be 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 a great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten 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 to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. that had been covered up for a long time 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. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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, you a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, 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 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 was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is 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 chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the scores, and saying to 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, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice 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 come 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 teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear 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 doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work on 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 stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is 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 does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)