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 going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant who care and draw other people in can we as much progress as we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that 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 make changes. The next breakthrough 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 that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved things 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 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 other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is 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 gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because the disease is only in the countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria 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 poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that in a couple months. And that should save over two 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 involves communicators to keep the high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to malaria.
Now let me turn to a second question, a different question, but 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 lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And 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 all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of reason we’re successful. I can say 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. There are fairly effective in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the for those top 20 percent is starting to fade a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities to people with a better education. And we have to change this. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been covered for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last 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 in libraries. A lot these things had a good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — 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 performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, 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 those quartile teachers. And 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 other people.” But I tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers 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, are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an 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 school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in 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 engaged 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 is on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and 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 to be there. needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. 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 factory you’ve got these workers, some of them just making and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one 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 thing of to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. 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 all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us picture of where we are. And that allows us 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 are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought 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?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you could it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it can make a difference for millions of lives, if 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 at the name of 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. private sector 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 some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)