I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think can be solved. And part of the reason I that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. 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 was not only incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s 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, 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 of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when British 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. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So 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 recently can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds 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 the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have 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 great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito 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, do it vigorously, you can 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, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And world has gone through this where it paid attention then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts a 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 give the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves 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 how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous providing aid for these things. And so as these elements together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot 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 college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in 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 gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront things that are driven by advanced education, like science mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty 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 compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in 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 retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. chart takes four different factors and says how much they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a 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 are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people 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 very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set 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 on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent 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 their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m 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 rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very environment, because particularly in those middle school years — through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be 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. the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip 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 on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from 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 courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much 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 so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we a lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a 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, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)