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