I a letter last 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 of an annual thing. A goal I had there to draw more people in to work on those problems, I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people 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 these and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, — and less than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still 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 can it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — even million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let 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 bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, 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. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools and work together. Of course we need drug companies give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second 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 of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 have been the best in the world, if you measure against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but 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 now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had 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 graduate from high 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 higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely 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 worked small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some 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 these are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And 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.” I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This 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 way the pay system works there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it in and 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 slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good example one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the 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 one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to fun of it or have the position of the who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers 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 come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher 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 trying to block the data. example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs always available, and so anybody who has access to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I 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 a lot of money into education, and I really think that education the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In fact we have in the bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had in it for these data systems, and it was taken out the Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just the very name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)