I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I 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 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 children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million 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 to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are great tool. What it means is the mother and child under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the 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 you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. 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 in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the 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 this 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. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent 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 biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they 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. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be 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 reward those people. We should retain people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, 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 who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise 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 teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle 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 is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was 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 paying attention, which kids were bored, 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 tone that everybody in the needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, 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, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s 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 sort working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and 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 them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems 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 broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)