I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that 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. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really 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? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that 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 years. In fact, if we look at the 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 the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death 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 where the rich countries are. So 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. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get 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 men are afflicted. 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 any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a 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 a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through 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 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 us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, 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 time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep 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 that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long because they always took the dropout rate as the who started in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if 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 jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely 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 scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more realized that having great teachers was the very key 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 is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia 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. We retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is 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 master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to people get their master’s degree. But it in no way associated with being 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 is to draw it in and to replicate it, to 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, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, 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 of classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is 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 of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, 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 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 me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It 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 put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)