I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want 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 at the past. Over past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a 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 States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And 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. so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, is where the rich countries 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 gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the 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 going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two of 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 to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell 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. 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 we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t 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 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 a higher chance of going to jail you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do 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 done things in libraries. A lot of these things a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that 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 years we would be blowing 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 people. We should retain those people. We should find out they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s 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 that is and 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 good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit 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 engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down 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 scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher 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 to block data. For example, New York passed a law that that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the 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 on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, 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 into education, and really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these 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, other people involved — and you’re helping to come with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)