I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, 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. Five ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 of them died before the age of five. So 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 not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people lived in Africa actually 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 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 figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And you end up with two choices. If you go a country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that 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 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 know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: do you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer 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, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even 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 teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent 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 and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade 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 you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how 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 things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening 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 their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which 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 goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are 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 it, to raise the average capability — or to the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do 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 a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and to a teacher, “Hey, you 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 was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to 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, 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, nobody to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just 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 do a good in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to 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 a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in 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 us the picture of where we are. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers 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 make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them that video to 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 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, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good 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 think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had 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. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like 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 things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)