I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to 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, 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 need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the 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 years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible 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 that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it 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 you use indoor with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool 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 right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a 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 get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s with why this 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 today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the 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 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 to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at 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 the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate 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 higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the 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 quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think 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 and says 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 and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring 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 replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with 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. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go 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 constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat 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, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position 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 normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t 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 improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital 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 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 of something I think I did 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 the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And fact, these free courses could not only be available just the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very 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 right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these 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 will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)