I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now 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 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 us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe 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 to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of 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 to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up 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, the mosquitos that 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 happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the 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. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the 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. foundation has backed 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. So we’re to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let turn to a second question, a fairly different question, I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that people would a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a 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 gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate 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, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the 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 will increase the of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and 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 people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does 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 their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is 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 some people who are 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 capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in 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 was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and 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 and 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 there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them making 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, and try and do a good job that one brief 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 thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed law that said that the teacher improvement data could be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic this, I think there are some clear things we do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out 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 ongoing is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit and 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. me — when this kid acted up, how should I dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very 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 physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be 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 — place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country have as strong a future as it should have. fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, 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 — can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)