I wrote a letter last week talking about the work the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does 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 in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this 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 at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was 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 most of have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I 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 have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But 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 end up with choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay 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 into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need 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 second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of 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 teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more 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 providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent 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 of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. 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 Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in 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 nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the 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 better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of 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 different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making 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 on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not 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 are some clear 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, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should have dealt with that?” And they could all sit work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go and watch the physics course, learn from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a for millions of lives, if we get it right. 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, at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)