I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. 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, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at 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 in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we 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 of the northern areas. more recently you 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 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 caused by greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. it means is the mother and child stay under the net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools and the 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 where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two 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 get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies 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 will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a 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 answer 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 had wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now people with a better education. And we have to this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront 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 kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout 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. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even you graduate from high 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 a 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, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of things had a good effect. But the more we looked it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — 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 top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us Asia would go away. Within four years we would be everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the 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 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. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there a few places — very few — where great are being made. A good example of one is set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 of their high 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 team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying 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 down 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 something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How that compare to a normal school? Well, in a school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said the teacher improvement data could not be made available used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort 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 going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can those great courses and make them available so that kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could only be available just on the Internet, but you could make so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally 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 to take brilliant people like you to study these things, other people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)