I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of 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 of those died before the age five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut 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 vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease thousands of 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. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over 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 British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which where the rich 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 recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the 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. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into a country with right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. 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 answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had 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 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 on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at 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. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of 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 because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon 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 than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a 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 nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. much variation is there within a school or between schools? And answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on 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 would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation 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. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and 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 teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. 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 saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What going on?” The teacher was running around, and the level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that 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 times the principal can come into the classroom — to once per year. And they need advanced notice to that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got workers, some of them just making crap and the is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once year, but you need to let us know, because we 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 of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort 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 going on, and that’s given us the picture of where are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom 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 clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who 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 from that. If have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 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 Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free 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 a as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. only had time to frame those two problems. There’s lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle 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 sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s 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 will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)