I wrote a letter last week talking about the of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into 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 the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the 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 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 disease we see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over 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 rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was 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 most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its 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 it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could 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 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 late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite 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 the right tools and the right way, you do 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 disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention 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 a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives 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 get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have 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 gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the 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. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that 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 chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked 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 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 between schools? And the answer is that these variations absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four we would be blowing everyone in the 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 can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very 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 think these are people with 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 are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They the poorest 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 constantly improving their teachers. They’re data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching 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?” The was running around, and the energy level was high. thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly those middle school years — fifth 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 of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is 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 into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of just 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 to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing trying to block the data. For example, New York a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that a kid 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 watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so who 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 book actually, about KIPP — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a 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 a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize important 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 lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you study these things, get other people involved — and you’re to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)