I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not 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 in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason feel that way is looking at the past. Over the century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a 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 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 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 by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a disease for thousands 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 things avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten 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 paradox because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies these areas going because it just holds things back much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos 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 is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool 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 right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind 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 the world has gone this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new 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 over thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get 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 together. Of course we need drug companies to give their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this 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 say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in 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, if measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We have change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never high school. And that had been covered up for 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 the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was to over 30 percent. For 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 ever a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, 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 of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much 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 answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us 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 teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. 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 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 with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into pension. The second is giving extra money to people who 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 people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply 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?” And teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that 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 classroom — sometimes 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 management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to 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 not be made available and used in the decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some things we can do.
First of all, there’s a more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public 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 a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken 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 we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)