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 annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I there are some 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 having brilliant people 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 to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. part of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how 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. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was was eliminated 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 of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer 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 rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds back 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 should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end with two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and 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 is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in 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 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, keep the 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 in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems the kind of question that people would spend a 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, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the we’re successful. I can say 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 effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, 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 because always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared 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 before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve 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 the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer no. Once somebody has taught for three years their 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 different 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, way the pay system works is there’s two things are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and 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 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 what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and 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, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” the teacher 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 very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory 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, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used 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 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. And that allows to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot 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 we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re 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 naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)