I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had was to 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 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 as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these problems and talk about where they stand. 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 reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa 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 in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay 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 and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get 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 the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite 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 this is: How 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, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all 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. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. 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 better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad 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 year and 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. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 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 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how 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 on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that 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 like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system 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 with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what on 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 attitude in those schools is very different in the 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 engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be 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 they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in 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 sit and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)