I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — 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 in to work 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 do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we 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 those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age 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 not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is 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 raise this morning, is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread 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 can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did 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 of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much 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 are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it 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 around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) 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. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And 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 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 and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over 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 road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we 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 people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of 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 you measure them 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 for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look 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. have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started 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 to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people 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 effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within years we would be blowing 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 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 absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people 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 explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve 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 in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly 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 different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will 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 a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement 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, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where 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 basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for 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 a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t 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 you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)