I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more 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. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s 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 for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring 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 was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are 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 caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these going because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of 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 poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — 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 with two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has 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 backed a vaccine that’s going phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save 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 road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to 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? seems like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some 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 United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone to create 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 more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that 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 this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is 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 number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done 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 than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the 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 you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked 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 at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — 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 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 quartile teachers. And 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 this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think 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 quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the 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 extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers 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 almost to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public 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 making teaching better.
When you go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly 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 those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, 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 job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have 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 said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so 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 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 now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in 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 anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the to have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had 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 are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make 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 to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other 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)