I a letter last week talking about the work of 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 of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the 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 we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and 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 by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history 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 several things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The 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 eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the 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 of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the 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 are put 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 any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some 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 a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you 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 rate soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that 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 the we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent 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 people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it that people have 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. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from 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 in United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than 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 years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says 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. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the 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 in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to 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 involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. 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 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 I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we 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 was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for millions lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to 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. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)