I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people to work on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the 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 draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share of these 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 think can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at 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 those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at bit over five million in the 1930s. So it 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 caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing 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 from all the temperate zones, which is where the countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox because 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) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why 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 are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only 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, the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. that’s happened now 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 that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we 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 those tools will ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it attention and then 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 starts a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the map. Because the road map to get rid of disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do make a 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 don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of 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 college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and the 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 are getting. Not 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. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who started senior year and compared it to the number who finished 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 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 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 chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, 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 of things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of class — based on test scores — by over 10 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 away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average — or to encourage the people with it to stay in system.
You might 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 high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where teachers are 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 teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools is 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 amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and 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 be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so 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. In the teacher’s contract, 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 can only come here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to 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 that the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting 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 teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this 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 I it was 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 education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a 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 just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I there’s some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)