I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m to share two of these problems and talk about they stand. But before I dive into those I want admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, was four 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 diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get 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 men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going 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 those 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 new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened 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 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 shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t 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. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because 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 stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able 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 teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a of time on, and 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, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you 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 lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these 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 they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of 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 take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to 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, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — to once 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, you only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could 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 about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make 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 watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very 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 so fantastic. gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and was taken 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, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)