I wrote a letter last talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had 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 more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention to these things and brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were 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 one those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 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 the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s 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 disease we can see that people who lived in actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the 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, the U.S. and of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get 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 the million deaths a year by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind 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 up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of 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 generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you a teacher great? It seems like the kind of that people would spend a lot of time on, we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best the world, if 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 those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education 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 better education. And have to change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned 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 as number who started in senior year and compared it the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should 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 the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how 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 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 second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and 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 the teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, 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 is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the 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 attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so is doing it.
How does that compare to a school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a where you’ve got these workers, some of them just 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, try and do a good job in that one moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First 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 doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all 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 little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and them available so that a kid could go out watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to 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 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 — the place that this 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 good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make 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 going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)