I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does 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 who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As 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 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each 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 that used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I 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 the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death 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 did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated 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, the U.S. and most of have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most 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 get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the 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 tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever in the past 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 get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind question that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that 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 education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent 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 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 have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 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 the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us 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 quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill 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 very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes 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 system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable 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 is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, aren’t told 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 to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, 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 that the teacher improvement data could not be made 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 there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If 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 not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot 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 the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot 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 things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick 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 you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)