I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind 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, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million 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 those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the 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. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness 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 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 so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths 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 the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And 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 give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get 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 course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we 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 wonderful education. That’s part the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change 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 that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the were before that. But most of the dropouts had place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever 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. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has 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 things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile will increase the performance of their class — based on test — by 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 difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, says there’s no 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 pay 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 better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s 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 that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go 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 constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, 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, and energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or the position of the kid who doesn’t want to there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does 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, 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 a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and management is told, “Hey, you can only come down once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do 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 whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and 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 some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the 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 did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could 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 those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access 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 a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was 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, we get it right. I only had time to frame those problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very 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 put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people you 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 things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)