I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So 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 am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five 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 reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated 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 most of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the 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 bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every 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 do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world 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 a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able 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 great? It seems like the kind of question that people spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of 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 teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. have to 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 driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a long time they always took the dropout rate as the number who 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 dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was 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 a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you a higher chance of going to jail than you do of a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in 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 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 much 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 absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once has taught for three years their teaching quality does change 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. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and 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, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than in 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 deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the 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 KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a 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 come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call 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 basis is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it everyone sees who is the very best at teaching stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If 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 free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and I really think that is the most important thing to get right for country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make 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 you to study things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)