I wrote a 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 of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 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 age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one those lives matters 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 the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s 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 actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. 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 should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map 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 get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these 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. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to 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 teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers 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 against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength 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. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids 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 who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, 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 make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a or between schools? And the answer is that these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing 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 they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers 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 example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very 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 this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making 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 rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in 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 be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a 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 times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)